


Learning Curve

by ilarual (Ilarual)



Category: Soul Eater
Genre: Pre-Canon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2013-09-30
Updated: 2015-07-10
Packaged: 2018-04-08 14:29:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 14
Words: 32,058
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4308681
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilarual/pseuds/ilarual
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The process of getting from "you" and "me" to "us" is a long, hard, complicated one. A series of vignettes exploring the early days of Soul and Maka's partnership and the road from strangers to best friends.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Pledge

**Author's Note:**

> This isn't so much a concrete series or a singular story as much as it is a oneshot collection of sorts with the intent to paint a picture of Soul and Maka: The Early Years. The vignettes contained herein are interrelated around the same theme and mostly linear (though I can't promise the latter will always be the case, although anything that deviates from a linear timeline will be clearly noted as such), and there isn't any end goal for when this series will be finished, as (with only a few exceptions) most chapters will be self-contained and new chapters will be written and posted when I have the inspiration to do so.

Orientation at Shibusen was not like orientation at other schools, as Soul Eater quickly discovered. For legacy kids or kids who had grown up in Death City- "death children" he heard they were called, as if that wasn't freakin' creepy- and were more familiar with the weapon/meister lifestyle, it wasn't quite so intense. They only had to attend the preparatory seminar that was mandatory for all new students on the Friday before the fall term started, and then the stupid mixer thing the following day that apparently was supposed to "break the ice" and encourage students to partner up as quickly as possible.

Incoming students who  _didn't_  have the benefit of growing up in this freaky new world he's plunging headfirst into had a whole different set of requirements. Requirements like a three-day crash course that he was pretty sure should be titled something like "Hey Genius Here's What You Got Yourself Into, Hope You Have The Balls For It Because If You Don't You Better Bail Now Before They Get Sliced Off Or Something." At least, that's what he would have called it if he were the one naming it.

Hey, no one ever said he was clever with word-play.

Long story short, Soul had discovered over the course of the last few days that the life of a demon weapon was absolutely nothing like what the outside world had taught him to expect... and exactly what he was looking for. Simply put, he was pretty sure he had stumbled into the coolest career this side of being an astronaut, maybe even cooler. He'd gotten on that plane out of Connecticut because he couldn't stand being in that house for even one more  _second_. His weapon gene was his ticket out and that was it. He hadn't thought about it in any more detail than that. It was worth it just to see his mother's face when he informed his parents that he was going to pursue a career with such a... for lack of a better word,  _complicated_ reputation. But he was beginning to get what this whole weapon thing was really about, and he liked it.

He couldn't be a musician, but just maybe he could be a hero.

The penultimate day of the orientation cycle was just about finished, and Soul was itching to go back to his apartment because he was pretty sure the cable guy was supposed to have come today and like any preteen boy would, he was looking forward to the novelty of being able to watch whatever he wanted on TV without having his parents policing his viewing habits.

First, though, he was required to sit through one last lecture, some kind of introduction to the nature of the partnership between weapon and meister. He was just grateful that it wasn't endlessly long like some of the other sessions he'd had to sit through for the last few days.

The incoming class was bigger than he would have expected for such a specialized field, at least two hundred people or more, and every new student was currently sitting on the bleachers in one of Shibusen's many athletic centers (physical fitness, he had been informed, was  _very_  important to the nature of the work they would perform). It was an interesting mix. Mostly they were kids like Soul, somewhere between the ages of ten and twelve, but there were some nontraditional students- teenagers and even some adults- mixed into the crowd as well.

A trim, solidly-built black woman took her place in front of the new students and raised a hand for silence, which fell immediately. She had the kind of quiet authority that commanded attention without insisting upon it. Soul recognized her vaguely from the staff introduction two days before; she was a weapon and a pretty well-respected one if he had to take a guess, although he couldn't recall her type.

"For those of you who don't remember," she said in a carrying voice, "My name is Mira Nygus. I know you're all anxious to get home for the afternoon, so I'll keep this brief, but since what I'm here to talk to you about today is very serious, please give me your full attention.

"As you all know, you will be partnering with another individual as you go forward with your training here at Shibusen Academy. Our system of pairing weapons and meisters together is very important to the work we do. I won't go into all the reasons for that, because that's what your classes will be for, but there's one reason that I do want to talk about. It's not as scientific as many of the other things you'll be learning, but it's far more important: your partner is the one who keeps you alive."

There was a whisper of sound from the crowd of students as many shifted uncomfortably in their seats. Soul had to resist the urge to roll his eyes because  _seriously_ , it wasn't exactly a surprise at this point that they were in a dangerous business.

"I'm sure plenty of you have heard the story of our recent graduate, new death scythe Justin Law, who achieved his rank without the aid of a meister. It's surely an incredible accomplishment, and there might be a few of you weapons out there who are thinking of trying to do the same."

Nygus's vividly blue eyes raked over her audience, and now it was Soul's turn to squirm a little. Okay, the thought had crossed his mind once. Or twice. Or maybe a lot because he wasn't so great with people and from everything he'd been told this whole weapon/meister partnership deal involved a whole lot of getting really up close and personal with another person.

The older weapon continued: "This line of thinking is not a good idea. Mr. Law was an exceptional case, and it's extremely unlikely that anyone would be able to duplicate what he's achieved, so if you want to try it, just... don't. Take my word for it that you're going to be much happier and much better off finding a compatible partner.

"The bond between a weapon and meister is a very complicated one. It starts with the initial compatibility of two or more souls, and it takes a lot of hard work and time to strengthen that bond. Your weapon or meister isn't just going to be your partner; in order for your partnership to work, they need to be your friend and an integral part of your life. This isn't just because it makes it easier to work together, either. Your partner is going to know you in a way that few others- if anyone- will ever do so. They will know your soul and you will know theirs, and that takes a lot.

"The most important thing for you guys to remember right now is not to stress yourselves out about a partnership. Not everyone finds a compatible partner right away and that's okay. It's better to take your time and find a partner you're comfortable with than to rush into pairing up with someone who's a bad match. It's also important to remember that you're not making a lifetime agreement. Not every partnership is permanent. It's very true that many meisters and weapons remain partners for decades. My meister and I have been working together for almost ten years, for example. But there are also plenty of pairs who separate upon graduation or even earlier, if they find that the partnership isn't working any longer. You're not signing a binding contract.

" _That being said_ ," Nygus continued, and her calm, even tone had taken on an air of gravitas, "you  _are_  going to be making a commitment to someone when you agree to be their partner. For you meisters out there, it will be your job to guide, train, and strengthen your weapon as the two of you grow together. It is because of the existence of demon weapons that we're able to successfully keep the world safe from evil, and your weapon's well-being is your responsibility. Look after him or her. And as for you weapons..."

She paused, and the haunted look on her face gave Soul chills. She fixed those striking eyes of hers firmly on the students before her and continued: "Protect your meister. Even in your human form, you're more durable than your partner. That's a side-effect of the weapon gene, and I'm sure many of you already know that. Don't forget it, because your partner is much more vulnerable than you are. I'm not saying that idly. I speak from experience when I say that you do not want to fail in this. I lost my first partner not long after we graduated. She was my best friend and I let her down. I'll say it again:  _weapons, protect your meisters_. That is your most important duty, above all else."

Nygus finished speaking, and silence reigned in the hall for the length of a few heartbeats. Then Nygus's somber expression lightened ever so slightly. "If everyone's clear on the responsibility of taking on a partner, then you're dismissed."

All around him the other students rose to their feet, chattering happily or else discussing Nygus's lecture in more serious tones with new-found friends, but Soul stayed fixed in his seat as if he'd grown roots.

How was he supposed to  _do_  this? From what he'd just been told, pairing up with a meister was an even bigger deal than he'd thought. All this talk about close friendships and soul-bonding...

He'd never cared about  _anyone_  that way. He loved his family, more or less, but that was too tainted by resentment and guilt and bitterness and jealousy for him to have any substantial attachment to them. Wasn't that why he was here in the first place? And he hadn't exactly had a lot of friends back East. Well, not  _real_  friends, not the kind Nygus was talking about. He knew how to say all the right things to get people to like you, or at least want to spend their time around you. With a face like his, he'd had to learn that early on, because kids were cruel if you didn't know how to work the system. But that wasn't really friendship and he knew it, not the kind of friendship where people actually cared about you and you cared back, and nobody was hoping to get something out of it or use the other.

Soul Evans didn't know how to do these things. He'd never been taught how.

_Then again_ , he thought,  _I'm not Soul Evans any more, am I?_


	2. Blades

Soul was a little reluctant to take the hand she was offering. He'd been a little reluctant to touch  _anyone_  more than he absolutely had to for the last few months. He couldn't quite shake visions of lacerated skin and severed fingers that had plagued him since the first blade had phased unintentionally from his shoulder. It had been all he could do to stand still while Wes gave him a gruff hug by way of farewell before dropping him off at the airport, and he'd been intensely grateful that their parents couldn't be bothered to accompany them ("prior engagement" his ass) because it spared him the minefield of awkward handshakes and infantilizing pats on the head or cheek.

The paranoia was warranted, too, because he still wasn't sure how to handle this sudden tendency his body had developed to sprout steel and sharp edges without his permission. He'd mostly got it under control, and he knew that all he needed was a little time and practice (and somehow he felt the practice involved would be a whole lot cooler than the innumerable hours he'd spent slouched over a keyboard), but there were still occasional accidents and the whole situation made him a little twitchy at the thought of human contact. It wouldn't cast a very favorable light on his future career as a weapon if his very first act upon partnering up was accidentally slicing open his new meister. After the lecture Nygus had given yesterday about protecting your meister, it would be pretty uncool to hurt her right off the bat. Speaking of his new partner...

She was still looking at him with those enormous, shockingly green eyes of hers, a guileless smile on her face and her hand outstretched for him.  _Maka_. He'd known her all of ten minutes and somehow ended up baring his soul to her on a dusty, sticky-keyed Baldwin, and he had absolutely  _no idea_  what to make of her. He wasn't sure if she was messing with him or what, because he was having a hard time buying that someone actually had a desire to partner with him, but she seemed so sincere and he wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. There was just something about her that he couldn't quite put his finger on, and he had to admit he was intrigued.

And... she liked his music (or at least said she did), and he didn't know what to make of that. Probably it was because, as she'd told him, she didn't know anything about music, but he'd take it. She'd heard him play  _his own music_  and actually enjoyed it. After the repeated rejections he'd gone through before she bounced up and introduced herself (all polite rejections, of course, but weren't they always?), it was a good feeling to be appreciated. Not something he was used to, but nice.

He glanced at her hand and steeled himself- no, bad word choice!  _Braced_  himself, that was better- before reaching out and clasping the hand she had offered him.

"Well, Maka Albarn, I guess that makes us partners."

He had a partner. A meister. A technician. He wasn't gonna be stuck as the last partnerless weapon in the school. He allowed himself a small smile.

Her grin, in contrast to the slight twitch of his lips, widened exponentially as she squeezed his fingers once in excitement before breaking their handshake. She was practically buzzing. "You won't regret it, Soul! I promise." A thought seemed to occur to her. "By the way, what's your last name? You never said."

As far as he was concerned, Soul Evans had vanished the moment that jet had taken off from Bradley International. The name that was on his birth certificate wasn't  _him_ , never had been. Soul Evans was like a skin that didn't fit right. His given name worked. He liked Soul. His parents had picked a good name for him. But between his looks and his musical failings and whatever quirk of genetics had decreed that he start popping blades from his appendages, he was pretty sure he had been an Evans in name only. They had tried their best to make him part of the family and he had tried (at least for awhile) to make himself into what they wanted, but it hadn't worked and he wasn't like them and yeah he was young but he was so  _tired_  of never being what was desired. He was tired of letting down people who had tried to love him because he just couldn't fit his stupid square peg in a round hole.

Shibusen was a fresh start. He was going to make this place different. He'd be good at this weapon thing and have actual friends, not just a group who hung around each other for the sake of convenience. It had made sense, then, that he ought to leave behind all the things that didn't work. Evans was the name on (most of) the paperwork in the academy's files, but as far as he was concerned, no one at Shibusen besides the pencil-pushers in the registrar's office ever needed to know that he was Soul Evans-yes-as-in- _those_ -Evanses.

He had a new name now, one that he liked a whole lot better.

"Call me Soul Eater," he said, baring his teeth in a feral smirk.

"Soul...  _Eater?_ " She sounded dubious.

"Yeah," he challenged her, belligerent to the core. "Got a problem with that?"

Maka scrutinized him from behind a surprisingly good poker face for a few moments. In that tiny stretch of tense silence, Soul had a brief, panicked thought that maybe he'd pissed her off and he was about to be dumped by his first meister. Wouldn't that be just his luck?

Then her expression broke into a grin that he could only describe as positively demonic, with a show of teeth to rival even his and eyes flashing in a way that made Soul suspect that his initial assessment of her (plain vanilla, goody two shoes, so sweet butter wouldn't melt, etc.) might not be entirely accurate. "I  _like_  it," she announced. "It's really intimidating. I bet even a witch would think twice before taking on a scythe called Soul Eater!"

That was kind of what he'd thought, too.

Yeah, he and this girl could work together just fine.

"Well, come on then, Soul Eater," she said. "We can go let Miss Ygraine know we'll be partnering together."

* * *

After they filled their requirements in letting the faculty supervisor know they had accepted a partnership, they wandered around the school grounds. On Wednesday Soul had taken the official tour given to all new students, but Maka seemed to have a much more intimate knowledge of the academy than the cursory overview he'd been provided. She knew about things like which water fountains to avoid because they were broken and would shoot water up your nose, and that there was an awesome view from one particular balcony where you could see the entire city clearly, or about the back stairwell that, she explained, was probably enchanted because there was no logical way it could lead from behind the ground floor gymnasium all the way to the greenhouse on the roof with so few steps.

Her knowledge baffled him since technically speaking the new semester hadn't even started yet and she, like himself, was in the youngest class. She didn't say as much but he hazarded a guess, based on a few things she  _had_  said, that she must be legacy. It would explain her familiarity with Shibusen's layout, anyway.

They ended up in an empty classroom on one of the upper levels of the main building. Maka perched on a desk, swinging her legs and chattering away cheerfully, and he sat backwards on a chair, propping his chin on the backrest and watching her. Strictly speaking, they probably should have gone back to the partnering mixer after they'd finished their walk, but they'd gotten caught up in conversation. Soul certainly wasn't complaining. The tower room where the rest of the school's solo students were trying to latch onto a partner they could work with was crowded and noisy and it made him twitchy.

He couldn't remember the last time he'd talked to  _anyone_  for this long. The only person he'd had lengthy conversations with since... well, as far back as he could remember, really, had been Wes. But Wes was always gone these days, so Soul was a little out of practice at anything more lengthy than small talk. He was amazed he'd managed to put up with it for such a prolonged period, because he didn't really have a high tolerance for people to begin with and Maka talked  _a lot_. She was interesting, though. She wasn't a thing like anyone in his family, and she  _definitely_  wasn't like the kids he had known at the private academy he'd attended for primary school.

Maka was a chatterbox, but she gave him chances to talk, too. He didn't really need it, but he appreciated the effort, especially since she actually seemed genuinely interested in him, and listened when he talked. Soul really hoped this was indicative of how she would operate as a partner. He remembered the lecture from yesterday all too well. He knew it was the role of a weapon to follow their technician's lead, but he was an independent person by nature and he wasn't sure how well he would do if he ended up with a meister who ignored his input.

Being virtual strangers, they kept to relatively neutral topics, and it wasn't long before the conversation circled back around to the mutual career path that had thrown them together in the first place.

"I always knew I was going to be a meister when I grew up," she informed him.

"Impressive. I definitely didn't picture myself being a weapon." When he was little he'd thought he was going to be a musician. Look how  _that_  turned out...

"Well it's lucky you decided to go this route!" she said. "It would've been a shame to waste you on anything else, since scythes are so rare."

"Really?" He hadn't known that.

Maka nodded, her pigtails swinging. "As far as I know there are only six or seven active scythes in the world. There are probably more who are retired or decided not to make a career as a weapon, but aside from some unusual specialty weapons, scythes are pretty much the rarest type. It's a shame, because a scythe is Lord Death's weapon of choice."

"Hence the title Death Scythe?" he guessed.

She nodded again, and her expression was somehow both amused and troubled at the same time. Soul wondered just what had made her look like that, and resolved to figure it out as soon as possible.

For the time being, though, he was more interested in pondering the of information she had just handed to him. Not only had he inherited this skill he hadn't even known ran in his family, he was an uncommon, even in-demand type of weapon? Well, didn't  _that_  just say delightful things about him, that even with that in mind nobody had wanted to partner with him before he met Maka. Not that it was any surprise, but he had to admit he was just a little disappointed that even here he wasn't most peoples' cup of tea.

They had lapsed into silence, the first since they'd agreed to be partners. It was slightly awkward, as silence between near-strangers always is, but it wasn't quite uncomfortable, either. Soul contemplated Maka, and tried to put together the pieces of everything he'd learned about her. He didn't even have to think about it to know that, obvious teacher's pet-type or not, this girl was gonna be trouble. Well,  _good_. He could use a little trouble in his life, and he was pretty sure the kind of trouble Maka would bring (he envisioned witches and demons and walking around Shibusen with a reputation as the coolest kishin-slayer in school) was exactly the kind of trouble he was looking for.

"Hey, Soul?"

"Yeah?"

She fiddled with one of her pigtails. "Do you think I could see your blade, maybe?"

People had been asking variations of that ever since he'd discovered this hidden talent of his, and it wasn't a surprise that his new meister would have the same request. As far as Soul was concerned, Maka Albarn was the first person who had actually had the right to ask. That was how this worked, right, this partnership thing?

"Sure." He shrugged out of his suit jacket and unbuttoned his left sleeve, rolling it up past his elbow. At Maka's questioning look, he explained, "I know the clothes are supposed to transform with me, but I'm not very good at this yet and this is a nice suit, so-"

"Oh. Makes sense." She peered at him curiously as he tucked the last folds of ruby fabric out of the way. "Did you only just find out you're a weapon or something?"

He nodded. "My family didn't even know we had the weapon gene until I accidentally transformed a couple months ago."

She giggled. "Must have been a shock."

"Somethin' like that."

"I'm surprised it manifested so late," she remarked. "Usually it happens a lot earlier than that."

He hummed noncommittally, his attention more focused on his bare forearm than on the trivia she was throwing his way. This still took a fair bit of concentration to pull off, but he'd been told it would get easier as he got more comfortable with his weapon form. A heartbeat, a huffed breath, and a gleam of white light later, and skin had been traded in for steel.

The corners of his lips twitched upwards in a satisfied grin. He would never get tired of this. This was  _his_ , something that couldn't be taken away.

He watched Maka closely, studying her reaction. Her large eyes widened visibly, and he supposed it was a sign of how entrenched she was in this world that it wasn't in fear or mistrust the way it had been with everyone else who had asked to see this. She was curious and... impressed? His smirk widened.

It was good to know that even a kid who'd grown up in this world could be affected by the sight of his blade.

She reached out with one hand as if to lay her fingers against the multicolored steel of his blade, but at the last moment she stopped. Maybe the way he had tensed ever so slightly in a moment of panic at the thought of soft fingers and sharp steel had halted her. Her eyes flicked up to meet his. "May I?" she asked.

He shrugged.  _Be cool._  "Careful. It's sharp."

Maka rolled her eyes. "Thanks for the tip,  _Soul_. I'd never have worked that out without you."

Sarcasm.  _Interesting_.

She laid her hand against the flat of his blade, running her fingers slowly down towards the tip, tracing the jagged line dividing the color pattern down the middle. No one had ever touched him in this form before, and the sensation was strange, like his arm had fallen asleep or something. He hadn't expected to actually be able to feel her touch, somehow, and he shivered.

Maka pulled her hand away. "Sorry! I didn't hurt you, did I?"

"Nah. Just a little chilly in here without my jacket," he lied automatically.

Given that it was August in Death Valley, his excuse wasn't exactly watertight, but though Maka gave him a skeptical look she didn't challenge it, for which he was grateful. There was no possible way to explain that he was barely used to being touched on his human skin, let alone his strange new metal body, without giving a completely uncool first impression. He'd already gone out of his way to make sure she knew exactly what she was getting herself into with him. As far as he was concerned, that was enough soul-baring for one day.

Assured now that she wasn't crossing any lines, her hand returned to the surface of the blade. Her skin was warm against him. He had to resist the urge to tense up and jerk away as one of her fingers tapped against the pointed tip of his blade, then ran ever so lightly along the sharp edge. As it was, he all but stopped breathing, terrified that a single movement might hurt her. But she ran those tiny curious fingers all along the wicked edge and pulled them away without spilling a single drop of her blood, and some tight knot somewhere in Soul's chest eased unexpectedly.

Her hands moved back to the flat surface and turned his scythe-arm over to study the other side, eyes narrowed as she studied him closely. It was strange to be under such intense scrutiny, and more than a little awkward. He could all but see the cogs turning in her brain as her eyes raked over the gleaming metal in conjunction with her hands.

"The pattern is interesting," she remarked.

"Huh?"

"The colors on your blade," she explained. "You don't usually see weapons with patterning like this. Usually a demon weapon looks pretty much like a regular tool in their weapon form, not a lot of visible difference if you don't know what you're looking for. But this..." She traced again along the zig-zag pattern on the flat of his blade, little fingers skimming neatly along the divide between red and black. "It's not unheard of, but I've never actually seen anybody who had coloration like this."

"You talk like a textbook."

Green eyes shot up to his, startled and maybe a little bit affronted. Soul couldn't help but be amused by the combination.

She let out a little huff of annoyance. "Well  _excuse_  me for being interested. You're an unusual weapon, I'm just making observations."

"Of course I'm unusual. A cool guy like me, did you really think I was gonna be a run-of-the-mill kitchen knife or something?"

"If you were, trust me when I say we wouldn't be partners. I'm not a run-of-the-mill meister, either."

It was almost a challenge, and Soul understood something about his new technician quite suddenly: she was ambitious. He should have recognized it sooner, because he'd seen the same spark in Wes as long as he'd been alive, that drive to do more, to be better, to  _succeed_. It was something he'd always lacked, because he didn't have that drive to be The Best and it had always been one of his greatest stumbling points as a musician. He wasn't sure how to feel about seeing this trait in Maka. On the one hand, it was oddly reassuring to recognize something familiar in her, but on the other hand... how long before he let her down the way he'd let down everybody else who'd ever expected anything of him?

Well, it was like Nygus had said, right? Partnerships didn't have to be forever. Someone wanted to work with him for now. He wouldn't have to go through the embarrassment of flying solo for weeks or months before somebody decided to take pity on him. He'd go as far with Maka as she'd could get him, and when she eventually realized he couldn't go any farther, she could dissolve the partnership. No fuss, no hard feelings, just a simple parting of the ways.

This decided, he offered her a grin. "Sure you're not, Pigtails."

She stepped on his foot, and it definitely wasn't an accident.

"Ow, geez! What was that for?"

"For being a jerk."

"Hey, I'm not a jerk!"

"Well then don't act like it!"

"Whatever." Just for that, he retracted his blade from between her hands (carefully, because even if she was being a brat he didn't want to accidentally hurt her), demon steel phasing back into soft human flesh. "Are you done gawking at me yet?"

He was pretty sure the disappointed little pout on her mouth wasn't intentional. It vanished quickly enough when she caught sight of the clock high on the wall behind him and gasped.

"No way! How is it already after six o'clock?"

"Huh?  _Really?_ " They really  _had_  been talking for a long time.

"I gotta go," she exclaimed. "My parents were going to pick me up at six!" Before he could even pick up his suit jacket she had gone tearing out of the room.

"Goodbye to you, too," he muttered under his breath to the empty room.

A few seconds later, Maka appeared in the doorway again, her patent leather shoes skidding a little on the slick floor as she careened back into sight. "I'll see you on Monday, Soul! Meet at the top of steps at seven-thirty?"

He nodded dumbly.

"Great!" she chirped. "See you then!"

And she was gone again.

_Huh._


	3. Perspective

Rei Albarn,  _née_  Watanabe, tapped her fingers frenetically against the steering wheel of the shiny black sedan. The quiet idling of the engine formed a soothing background to her nervous impatience. Her daughter should have been there fifteen minutes ago; they had agreed to meet in front of the school at six.

She knew there wasn't really a material reason to be worried. Eighteen years previously she had been in her daughter's shoes, a brand new meister fresh off the plane and in search of a partner. She had even attended this same event the weekend before class commenced. She knew how easy it could be to get caught up in the search for a worthy weapon. Rei wondered if Maka would have better luck than she had back then. She kind of doubted it.

Maka was an ambitious girl, no doubt about it. Rei was proud of that- the drive her daughter had inherited from her was one of her most positive traits, as far as she was concerned. She couldn't help but think, though, that it might work against her in this case. Maka had told her repeatedly that she wanted to be a scythe-meister just like her mama. It was a flattering sentiment and made something in Rei's chest glow happily, but she couldn't help but caution her little girl not to get her hopes up. She hadn't had a chance to look over the list of incoming new weapons, but the odds of a scythe being among them were slim at best. Maka likely wouldn't find the ideal partner she'd been dreaming of practically since she'd precociously announced- at the tender age of five, no less- that she was going to be the best meister Shibusen had ever seen.

But it wasn't like there were no other options available to her. Rei hadn't seen the list, but she knew for a fact that the Duprés' youngest daughter was starting this year, and Maka could do a lot worse than being a lantern-meister. Or... there were rumors that a child of the Nakatsukasa family had come to the academy. Rei wasn't sure if this was true, because the Nakatsukasas were almost as famous for their reclusiveness as they were for their rare weapon-skills, but if it was true, that person would certainly be a suitable match for Maka. Rei had always harbored a secret desire to work with a Nakatsukasa for a partner. Well, maybe she would get the chance sometime soon...

Ah,  _there_  was Maka. Rei smiled at the sight of her daughter in her button-down shirt and pleated skirt; she was so enthusiastic about her new school uniform and it had been impossible to convince her that she didn't actually need to wear it until Monday.

Rei knew her daughter and could read her body language quite well, and there was no mistaking the pleased bounce in her step as she all but flew down the steep stairs. A bittersweet feeling welled up within her, because her little girl wasn't so little any more no matter how tiny she was, and she had almost definitely just met her first weapon.

Maka yanked open the door and flung herself into the car. "Hi, Mama!" she exclaimed. "I'm sorry I'm late. I lost track of time, and-"

"It's fine. I know how it can be." She smiled at the blonde girl as she buckled her seatbelt. "Be careful on those stairs, okay? They're steep and you shouldn't take them so fast."

"I know, I'm sorry," Maka said repentantly. "I'm just excited."

Rei restrained a smile at her daughter's enthusiasm as she put the car in gear and pulled out of her parking space. "I take it it went well, then?"

Maka absolutely beamed. " _Yes_. I found a partner!"

"That's great. Tell me all about her!"

"Him, actually," Maka said.

Rei had to resist the urge to take her eyes off the road to stare openly at her. She was not oblivious, and she knew only too well that she herself was not the only one who had been pushed to her emotional limits by her so-called husband and ex-partner's extracurricular pleasures. Maka was smart and observant and as much as Rei had tried to shield her from Spirit's philandering, she hadn't really succeeded. Over the last few years, her young daughter had not been shy about proclaiming her loathing for  _boys_ , and it didn't take a genius to work out where those feelings came from. Rei had actually begun to worry about it, but the fact that Maka had partnered with a young man with apparently no hesitation... well, that was reassuring. Maybe Spirit hadn't completely fucked up their daughter after all.

"Oh? Well then, tell me all about him," she rejoined as neutrally as possible.

Maka cocked her head to one side, watching the streets of Death City passing by out the windshield. "I'm not quite sure how to describe him," she said, sounding genuinely puzzled. "He's... interesting."

Leave it to Maka to try (however feebly) to get right to the meat of things and disregard other important details. "What's his name?" she prodded gently.

"Soul. His name is Soul Eater."

Rei wasn't entirely certain that her eyes weren't popping out of her head. "Oh really? That's... unusual."

"I like it," Maka said decisively. "It kind of fits him."

She didn't know if she wanted to know what that meant, under the circumstances.

"He's a scythe," her daughter continued. "I  _told_  you I was going to be a scythe-meister, didn't I?"

"You certainly did. Is that why you picked him?"

Maka shrugged. "That's why I was interested. He kinda left the mixer early and I followed him because somebody pointed him out and said he was a scythe. But mostly it was just  _him_. I don't know, there was something about him..." She pursed her lips thoughtfully. "He's very different. Kind of arrogant, but that's not all there is to him."

Rei pulled smoothly into the driveway of the tidy house Spirit's salary as a Death Scythe had afforded them, and as she put the car in park, she glanced curiously at her daughter. Maka, oblivious, continued to chatter away about her new partner, apparently spilling every tidbit the boy had shared about himself.

"I think he thinks he's really cool, but  _I_  think he's just a weirdo," she announced as she followed her mother indoors.

 _This_ , Rei decided,  _would require a little bit of investigation_.

* * *

It didn't take much. Before dinner (takeout, because Rei was good at many things but cooking was not one of them) she placed a quick phone call to Jim in the registrar's office and called in that favor he owed her. Her request was simple: she wanted a copy of the file belonging to a demon scythe by the name of Soul Eater. Jim promised to get the information sent to her as soon as possible, and with this assured in her mind, she set about getting her daughter fed.

Once Maka's bedtime had rolled around (and without so much as a phone call from Spirit; Rei thought it was indicative of quite a few things that Maka didn't even bother to ask where her father was), Rei slipped out to the office and flicked on the desktop computer she and Spirit shared. A quick check of her email confirmed that Jim had come through for her. Being a very influential meister and the former partner of Shinigami-sama's current weapon (not to mention having saved Jim's life on more than one occasion) had its perks.

She set about skimming the information on her daughter's new partner, and was mildly surprised by what she found. Soul Eater's name was actually Soul Evans, the younger son of a pair of extremely wealthy society types from Connecticut. There was a notable age gap between Soul and his elder brother. The family were apparently known for their musicality; prodigies were common enough in the family to be almost expected. According to Shibusen's records, the weapon gene had come in through the mother's side, although there hadn't been an actual manifest weapon in the family for almost two hundred years.

Soul's academic record from the private school he had attended for his primary education (Woodlawn Fine Arts Academy, which in Rei's opinion was a rather pretentious name for an elementary school) was nothing particularly noteworthy. He wasn't a poor student, but nor were his grades anywhere near as sterling as Maka's impeccable records. No notable behavioral issues beyond the kind of hijinks that were to be expected from a young boy, although there was a note on his records from the school's staff psychologist. It wasn't anything earth-shattering, just a concern that had been relayed from the school to the Evans family when Soul was about six years old that he seemed to have difficulty socializing successfully with the other students. The letter was dry and to the point. The boy was perfectly capable of interacting normally with his peers if forced to, but the good doctor was of the opinion that he was unusually shy. It was brought to the family's attention, apparently, because Soul was being prepared for a performance career and given how much of a hindrance excessive shyness could be in that field, they would of course want to take steps to address this issue immediately.

Well. Given that Soul was about to begin training to hunt witches and kishins, Rei could take an informed guess as to how well that performance career was working out.

There wasn't much else of note in the file. His initial soul evaluation was promising, with the potential to become an enormously powerful weapon in the hands of the right meister, although there were concerns about finding someone whose wavelength would be compatible. It appeared that, based on the practical evaluation, his wavelength was a bit tricky to match and rejected the attempts of several senior staff members to achieve pre-resonance. The last update on the file, which was time-stamped only a few hours previously, noted that Soul Eater Evans had been successfully partnered with meister Maka Albarn. The comments from Ygraine Roman, who had overseen the forging of partnerships among new students this year, indicated optimism that their wavelengths would be highly compatible if sufficient effort was put into developing the bond.

It was at about this point that Spirit arrived home. He wandered into the office and wrapped his arms around her chest from behind, nuzzling into her neck. He wasn't drunk but there was scotch on his breath, and he smelled of some slut's perfume. Rei's spine went rigid. He couldn't even be bothered to hide it anymore, damn him...

"Good evening, my beautiful wife," Spirit mumbled against her skin.

Gods, hadn't he gotten enough of that from whatever whore he'd found at the cabaret?

"Go away," she said, hating herself for her automatic reaction to his sensual tone. Even now that she'd realized whatever love she once thought she felt for this man was nothing more than the foolish infatuation of a teenage girl, the powerful attraction that had drawn them together hadn't faded.

Spirit might be a faithless dog, but she couldn't deny that he at least respected her enough to back off. "What are you looking at?"

"The file on your daughter's new weapon," she replied casually.

She could practically hear Spirit's hackles raise. "What? Her weapon? She has a weapon? Who is it?"

Rei clenched her fists to keep herself from hitting him. "If you had been home for dinner, you could have heard all about it from her," she said coolly. "I suggest you wait until morning. I'm sure she wants to tell her papa the exciting news in person."

Watching his reflection in the glare cast on the computer monitor, she saw his posture wilt. "Yeah..." He slumped away, metaphorical tail between his legs, and Rei felt a stab of vicious satisfaction when he paused in the doorway and muttered a sullen "goodnight."

Once she heard the sound of his (not "their," not anymore) bedroom door closing, she turned back to what she'd been doing before his intrusion. She scrolled through the last few items in the file, mostly just medical records and other relatively uninteresting minutiae she didn't read in detail; she wanted to make sure her daughter had an acceptable partner, not invade a stranger's privacy that deeply.

The last item in the file was the current photo that had been taken at the start of orientation for Soul's student ID. This, she studied much more carefully than the previous items. If Maka's new weapon had an unusual name, his appearance was at least equally so. He appeared to have inherited some form of albinism, if the messy shock of stunningly white hair and deep crimson eyes were anything to judge by. His features were still young and boyish, but she could see that he would likely be quite handsome once he'd grown up a bit. That set off a distant alarm or two, but she tried to repress it, knowing it was her own paranoia relating to pretty-boy weapons talking. She studied the tight-lipped smirk taking up residence on Soul Eater's face in place of a smile, and fancied that she could see something bitter in the boy's eyes.

Rei sighed, closed the file, and sat back in her chair with a tired groan. This scythe boy made her nervous, but she thought it might just be a maternal thing. She would reserve judgment until she'd had a chance to speak to him and find out what he was really made of.


	4. Old Friends, New Friends

Normal kids would knock on the front door for a visit rather than bursting through the window... on the second floor. Normal kids would wait until a decent hour of the morning to surprise their friends rather than deciding that three a.m. on a Sunday morning was a good time to show up. Normal kids would probably call ahead rather than just showing up.

Normal kids had about as much in common with the great Black*Star as fish had with an emu.

It was fortunate that the self-proclaimed ninja was actually not nearly as stealthy as he would like to believe, because the sound of his boots on the roof of the porch when he found his way up woke Maka. The sound of her window being pushed up alerted her to his presence so that she could launch herself across the room and slap her hand over Black*Star's mouth before he could jump into her bedroom and demand (loudly) that she get out of bed.

She was  _very_  used to this routine.

From behind her palm came a muffled stream of sound that could be roughly interpreted to be something along the lines of "What gives, Maka? How dare you silence your god!"

Maka stared at him, her lips pressed into a tight, annoyed line. "Hush up, moron! Do you wanna wake my parents up again? My papa almost killed you last time!"

More words now, stifled even more thoroughly as Maka pressed her hand even more firmly against Black*Star's mouth, which she took to imply that no mere mortal could kill him (regardless of the fact that he'd nearly had his arm sliced off at the elbow the last time he'd pulled this stunt).

She rolled her eyes. "Fine, whatever, move back. Let's go out on the roof so you don't make a scene." Not, of course, that there was much chance of  _that_. In the seven years she had known Black*Star, she had never once known him to be capable of keeping his voice down. She pushed past the blue-haired boy, causing him to flop backward onto the gently sloping shingles of the porch roof when he lost his balance.

By the time Black*Star had righted himself, she had slid the window almost closed and was seated cross-legged with her back to the house wall.

"What are you doing here, anyway?"

She was never sure what it would be with Black*Star. They had been friends (of a sort) since they were toddlers, and he had seen fit to pop in on her at hours that were frankly bizarre since she was about seven. The first time it had happened, he had woken her mama with his loud proclamations that his new ninja techniques would make him completely undetectable. On more than one occasion since then, one of her parents had ended up dragging him back to Shibusen, her mama more often than her papa (mostly because Black*Star usually showed up before her papa got home).

"Isn't it obvious? I, the great Black*Star, have found the weapon partner who's going to fight with me on the path to even greater greatness! I thought my favorite apostle would want to know all about it!"

In that moment, Maka  _really_  regretted teaching him the word 'apostle.'

"You're not the only one, you know," she said, a great deal more quietly. "I've found a weapon, too."

"Yeah? What is she, a demon chopstick?" he guffawed.

Maka thwacked him upside the head. "No! For your information,  _he's_  a  _scythe_."

For what she was pretty sure was the first time in her life, Maka saw Black*Star genuinely surprised by something. "Wow, your partner's a guy?"

"Why is that so strange?"

"Uh, maybe because last week you yelled that all men are scum and said there was no way you'd ever partner with a dude?"

Maka blinked. "Huh. I didn't know you ever listened to anything except what came out of your own mouth."

"Give me some credit, bookworm! The great Black*Star is all-knowing."

" _And_  we're back to business as usual."

Apparently 'business as usual' also included Black*Star deciding that thinking any more about her choice of partner was unimportant and getting back to the original purpose of his visit. "My weapon is so cool!" he announced loudly. "Her name is Nakatsukasa Tsubaki and she's-"

"A shadow weapon," Maka breathed in awe.

Black*Star stopped abruptly. "Yeah. How'd you know?"

"Black*Star, the Nakatsukasa clan is famous! My mama told me all about them. They're one of the most revered family of weapons in the world, and one child in each generation inherits-"

"-the weapon forms of all her ancestors, yeah, I know. Pretty awesome, right? Tsubaki is the perfect partner for the great me!"

Privately, Maka wondered what on earth a weapon of that caliber was doing with Black*Star, of all people. Aloud, however, she wondered, "But what's a Nakatsukasa doing here? They usually train their own in privacy."

"Isn't it obvious? She was drawn to Shibusen so she could partner and train with Black*Star!"

"Yeah right, I'll be amazed if she lasts a week before she runs screaming back to Japan."

Black*Star's notorious selective hearing kicked in as he rolled right past her snarky comment and said, "Whatever. You've got to meet her! She doesn't really know anybody in Death City yet and you're kind of a girl so you should be friends!"

While he was rubbing the enormous welt she had put on his cranium, Maka said huffily, "Yes, fine, I'd be delighted to meet your weapon. The poor girl's going to need  _someone_  to complain to, putting up with you. And I'll bring my weapon, if he's free. He's new in town too."

Black*Star nodded, still poking at the lump on his head. "Wanna meet after class on Monday? It's just gonna be an introduction day so we'll be done by lunch time."

As much as Maka knew about Shibusen, having been an insider as Death Scythe's daughter, it always amazed her how much  _more_  Black*Star knew about the school's daily rhythms, having been raised for all but the first year of his life within Shibusen's walls. Well, not for much longer. In just a little more than twenty-four hours she would officially start her career as a meister and then she would get to spend every day at the school as well. She would get to learn the patterns of the students and the flow of the academic calendar. She would be plugged in to the pulse of the school, too.

"Sounds fine to me," she agreed. "Meet you at the top of the steps?"

"You bet! Haha, this is gonna be  _awesome!_  You're gonna love my weapon partner, she's got truly great taste. After all, she saw  _my_  potential right away!"

"I think maybe she needs glasses," Maka muttered under her breath. More loudly she added, "Get out of here, Black*Star, or you're gonna wake my parents."

"Ha! Black*Star fears no one, even if he is a death scythe!"

She favored him with a smug grin. "Oh yeah? And what about my mama?"

Black*Star immediately went pale. "I- uh... gotta go. Even the man who will surpass god needs his rest." And as quickly as he had showed up, he was gone. He leaped directly from the porch roof to the sad, yellowing attempt at sod that passed for a lawn in Death City, and took off at a sprint that even Maka was willing to admit was impressive.

Shaking her head, she pushed the window back up and slipped inside.

* * *

She was caught a little off-guard by the appearance of her weapon when he came sauntering up to her on Monday morning. When they had met two days previously, he had been sharply dressed in a crisp suit and tie, and the sight of him in casual clothing was unexpected, although it really shouldn't have been. His hands were shoved in his pockets and that amazingly white hair of his was flopped all over his forehead, hiding his eyes and practically glowing in the bright Nevada sunlight.

"Hey, Soul," she said cheerily.

He tossed his head in greeting. "Hey." He glanced upward through his bangs, staring up at the maniacally-cackling sun. "How is it this hot  _already?_  It's like 7:30."

She pursed her lips thoughtfully, looking upwards as well. "I dunno, it doesn't seem that bad to me. It's actually pretty nice for August."

Soul stared at her, crimson eyes wide. "You're kidding."

"I'm not. That's what it's like in Death Valley."

"You mean it's  _always_  this hot?"

She shrugged. "Not always. I mean, in winter it's usually in the sixties, sometimes down in the fifties, Fahrenheit. Once when I was little it got all the way down to the low forties... that was crazy."

"So basically you're saying that there's no real winter here?" he asked, expression inscrutable.

"Basically, yes."

A slow smirky grin crept over Soul's face, showing off those fearsome teeth she desperately wanted to ask about but was too embarrassed to do so.

"That... is  _awesome_."

"What, do you not like snow or something?"

He shook his head. "Winters back East are gross."

Maka, who had the distinction of being able to say that she had never actually seen snow except on television, couldn't say with any credibility that she agreed. "I'll take your word for it. Listen, I'm meeting up with a friend of mine after class gets out. He wants me to meet his weapon-partner. You wanna come along?"

There was a split second of silence as Soul visibly hesitated, and Maka peered at him curiously, trying to read his expression. Then he shrugged.

"Sure, whatever. Not like I've got anything better to do."

She rolled her eyes. "Don't get too enthusiastic, Soul. You might strain something."

He snorted in amusement.

* * *

Predictably, Maka and Soul arrived at the agreed-upon meeting spot before Black*Star and his new partner. As they loitered around the top of the steps, sweating uncomfortably in the heat, which had been manageable at eight in the morning but was nearly intolerable by one in the afternoon. "I take it back," Maka mumbled, more to herself than her partner, "It  _is_  that bad even for August."

"No shit," Soul responded, somehow managing to sound cranky and apathetic at the same time. He was seated at her feet on the top step, back resting casually against the stone balustrade. "So, uh... who is this friend of yours, anyway?"

"His name's Black*Star."

"Black*Star?" Soul raised one pale eyebrow dubiously. "Weird name."

"Oh like you have room to talk,  _Soul Eater_."

"Fair point. Go on."

Maka tilted her head to the side, trying to think of a way to describe her childhood friend in a way that would adequately prepare Soul for Hurricane Black*Star without sending him screaming in the opposite direction before they'd even had a chance to get to know each other. "Well... we've known each other since we were little kids. He was taken in by the academy the day I was born and he grew up here at the school. He's... honestly, I'm not sure how to describe Black*Star. He kinda defies explanation."

"Yeah? How so?"

"He's... well, he's Black*Star."

Soul chuckled low in his throat. "Very descriptive, Miss Albarn."

"Oh shush!" Maka exclaimed with a frustrated stamp of her foot. "Look, the only word I can think of that fits is  _loud_. He's just... well, you'll see when you meet him."

At that very moment a short figure bearing unmistakable blue hair came charging up, closely tailed by a tall, graceful Japanese girl a few years older. Black*Star skidded to a stop in front of the pair waiting for him at the top of the stairs.

"Hey, Maka! How ya doin'?"

"Well-"

"I know, you're better now that I'm here! No need to thank me, I know how my magnificent presence lifts the spirits of everyone around!" he proclaimed.

Drawing on years' worth of experience in Ignoring Everything Black*Star Says, Maka restrained the urge to smack him upside the head. "Sure," she said through gritted teeth, showing what she considered to be admirable restraint. "What took you guys so long?"

"I was showing Tsubaki how a god like me avoids forced imprisonment!"

"You mean... you snuck out of detention?" Maka guessed. At Black*Star's ridiculously proud nod, arms crossed over his puffed-out chest, she could only gape at him. "How did you manage to get detention on the very first day?"

"What can I say? The great Black*Star has many talents."

"Apparently keeping out of trouble isn't one of them," Maka muttered under her breath. Raising her voice, she said, "Anyway, Soul, this is Black*Star,  _obviously_. Black*Star, this is my partner, Soul Eater."

Black*Star looked over at Soul, who had stood up during his partner's exchange with Maka, and immediately burst out laughing. "Geez, Maka!" he cackled. "I knew you were a wimp compared to me, but I wouldn't have thought you were so weak you'd have to partner with an old man just so you could keep up with your weapon!"

"Excuse me?" Soul asked, looking deeply offended, before Maka even had the chance to protest on her own behalf.

"Oh come on, man, your hair is ridiculous."

Soul bared his teeth in a threatening grimace. "Look who's talking, Cotton Candy."

" _What did you just call me?_ " Black*Star roared. " _Did you just insult the great Black*Star?_ "

"You heard me," Soul retorted. "You look like somebody put bright blue frosting all over your head."

"Why you-!"

Apparently not inclined to bother with words any longer, Black*Star resorted to fists, which were easier. He launched himself across the few feet between himself and Soul, landing a solid punch on Soul's jaw. Soul grunted in pain and indignation and retaliated by shoving Black*Star back hard enough to send the shorter boy crashing to the ground, but not before Black*Star had laid hold of the collar of Soul's shirt, dragging him down with him. In a matter of seconds the two were rolling around on the ground, kicking and punching any exposed body parts they could reach.

Maka's head dropped forward in resigned frustration and she let out a beleaguered sigh.

"Um... shouldn't we stop them?" asked the tall weapon standing to her right, who had been silent throughout the entire exchange. Her voice was soft and gentle, with only the faintest trace of an accent to her words.

Maka looked up (and up and up) at the daughter of the legendary Nakatsukasa family and offered her a tired shake of her head. "Nah. I've learned the hard way that when it comes to Black*Star, it's usually better to let him get it out of his system."

"But what if they get hurt?"

At that moment, from amidst the flailing tangle of limbs that was their partners, Soul could be heard yelling, "Don't make me bite you, you damn midget, because I swear I will!"

Maka glanced at the fighting pair, then back to the other girl with a smirk. "I think they'll be okay," she said. "Anyway, I'm Maka Albarn, scythe-meister."

"Nakatsukasa Tsubaki, shadow weapon." Tsubaki inclined her head politely and accepted the hand that Maka had extended to her. They shook hands firmly.

"It's really great to meet you, Tsubaki. Um, it is okay if I call you Tsubaki, right? It's not too familiar, is it?" Maka asked belatedly, recalling the lessons her mother had given her about the use of honorifics in her home country.

Tsubaki looked startled, but then a delighted smile bloomed on her lips. "It's perfectly alright, Maka-chan. I don't mind. I hope we'll be great friends."

"Well, as long as those two idiots we call partners over there-" she jerked her thumb in the direction of the tussling boys on the ground beside them, "-don't manage to kill each other, I think we'll be alright. And even if Soul and Black*Star end up hating each other, we can still hang out, okay?"  
Tsubaki's smile widened even further. "Thank you. I was a little worried about being able to make new friends here."

"I think everybody is when they start at a new school," Maka said sympathetically. "You know, I'm really surprised to see a member of your family here at Shibusen. Don't you usually train with your parents?"

The smile slipped ever so slightly before the older girl could recover. Maka didn't have enough time to wonder about it before Tsubaki had pinned the smile right back in place and explained, "Uh... yes, usually. But I decided that I... wanted to see more of the world."

Maka nodded in understanding. "I can understand that! I've lived my whole life in Death City. I've never even left the state of Nevada before!"

At that particular moment, Black*Star managed to push Soul off of him and right over the edge of the steep stairs, falling over with him with a very un-masculine squeak of surprise as gravity took hold, which caught the girls' attention.

"Soul!" Maka cried out, genuinely worried now.

"Black*Star!" Tsubaki echoed.

The two of them took off down the steps after their errant partners.

By the time they arrived at the bottom, Black*Star was helping Soul to his feet. The former was sporting a split lip, a large bloody scrape on his right arm from the concrete, and what looked suspiciously like teeth marks on his left shoulder. Soul had a swollen jaw where Black*Star's first punch had connected, and his nose was bloodied.

"So are we cool?" Soul asked.

Black*Star gave him a broad grin, trying manfully not to wince due to his split lip. "Yeah, bro. We're cool."

Maka and Tsubaki shared a bewildered glance before looking back at their partners, who were attempting to negotiate a fist-bump with bruised knuckles. Maka face-palmed in pure exasperation.

" _Boys._ "


	5. Assessment

Over the next few weeks, Maka began to feel as though she had developed a second shadow. A slouching, pointy-toothed, albino shadow by the name of Soul Eater, to be specific. He found her unerringly every morning before school and pretty much stayed glued to her side until they separated at the end of the day. Of course, it was normal (and strongly encouraged) for weapons and their meisters to spend as much time as possible together as part of the process of forging the soul bond, but it was also normal for both partners to develop other friendships outside of the weapon/technician dynamic.

And Soul... well, he didn't seem too keen on doing that. After that first day, he had struck up an easy friendship with Black*Star, which surprised her in the extreme because they were as different as night and day, although given how relentlessly cocky Soul proved himself to be, she shouldn't have been surprised. But he didn't seek out Black*Star, he just allowed the other boy to come find him, which Black*Star inevitably did because for one reason or another he had taken quite the liking to Soul Eater.

Beyond Black*Star and the equally shadow-like Tsubaki who followed him everywhere, however, Soul seemed disinclined to make other friends, and Maka couldn't understand why. When other people spoke to him he was easygoing and more or less friendly... the epitome of the cool guy he regularly claimed to be (his preoccupation with his image was another aspect of his personality that confused her). He clearly had no difficulties making himself, if not well-liked, at least respected by their classmates. Why, then, did he stick with her practically every day as though they'd been handcuffed together?

She thought she began to see the answer when she discovered his apartment.

It caught her a little off-guard that Soul had chosen to live all by himself in a two-bedroom apartment off campus, rather than in the dormitories on school grounds. It certainly wasn't unheard-of for students to live off campus, of course. She herself still lived with her parents, and there were other weapons and meisters who had grown up in Death City who did the same. Upperclassmen who had reached the high school equivalent levels frequently moved off campus as well. But for a first year student it was a little unusual (though she was quickly discovering that there was very little that was "usual" about her new partner).

When she asked him why he'd made the decision to live off-campus, he'd just shrugged and mumbled something about it being better than living in a crowded dorm building.

Maka began to get the impression that maybe her partner was actually a little shy. It seemed totally at odds with his laid-back persona, and she didn't quite know which to believe. After all, she had witnessed firsthand that although he appeared uninterested in participating in Shibusen's social scene, he actually possessed more social grace than she did, when he could be bothered to make use of it. A cool guy wouldn't be afraid of a little thing like making friends, right?

But then again, there was a lot about her partner that she couldn't understand for the life of her. It seemed as though there were two sides to him: the aloof, almost frightened boy in the pin-stripe suit she had met that first day, who played the piano like an angel and a devil all in one; and the cool, arrogant Soul who showed up to school every day in a t-shirt and jeans with a perennial hunch to his shoulders and a cocky smirk fixed permanently on his lips. The Soul who turned and hid his face if he smiled in the presence of anyone but herself, and the Soul who insisted that he could take on anything as if it would become true if he said it enough. And then there were things he did that didn't seem to quite fit either identity, like when he freaked out when he found out she was Death Scythe's daughter, or the way he drooled all over his wrist when he fell asleep in class. Soul was an enigma wrapped in a mystery wrapped in a puzzle, alright.

Maka found, though, that she kind of liked that about him. She had always been good at puzzles.

* * *

Over the first few weeks of school, Soul decided that he had absolutely no better idea what to make of his meister than he had on that very first day.

He learned a great deal about her in a very short period of time. His initial assessment of her as a teacher's pet proved to be incredibly accurate, but not in a suck-up kind of way (although she  _was_  a little bit of a goody-two-shoes). She was just really, incredibly intelligent. Soul had never thought of himself as unintelligent (unless compared to Wes... which he was...  _always_ ), but Maka's intellect actually blew him away, especially given the fact that she was a full year younger than he. He would be twelve in November, but she wouldn't even turn eleven until April. When he questioned how she'd gotten into Shibusen so young, she had huffed at him in annoyance and explained that she'd skipped the first grade and unless she wanted to waste a year attending a regular middle school, there was no point in delaying her enrollment any longer.

It probably helped her early acceptance that her father,  _of all people_ , was Lord Shinigami's current weapon. The day he'd learned that the friendly (possibly over-friendly) red haired death scythe who had tracked him down during orientation and offered to take him under his wing as a fellow scythe, was also his technician's father, had not been a pretty one. Soul had no intention of letting Maka know just how he had learned this piece of information, but he would really have appreciated a heads-up from her before he found out the hard way. Mr. Albarn was scary overprotective.

But from what he gathered from the few times he'd seen them interact, he guessed that Maka didn't have the best relationship with her dad. Boy, could he relate. In that context he could kind of understand her desire to create a weapon more powerful than her father was.

Which, yeah, it turned out that was her ultimate goal. He'd learned that less than 1% of the EAT-class weapons trained at Shibusen ever actually achieved the rank of death scythe, because very few weapon/meister teams had the power and stamina to take on a witch and gather the final, crucial soul that would grant the weapon that kind of power. It was a rare thing, and the death scythe her mother had created (because yeah, her  _mom_  was the technician who had made her dad's career, as if being Death Scythe's daughter wasn't prestige enough in this world) was especially powerful.

When Maka had dropped that particular bit of information on him, he had almost bailed right then and there. She was asking what had always been asked of him- to excel, to surpass, to be the  _best_ , and he'd never been able to do that before so why the hell should this be any different? It was a familiar, frightening kind of pressure, and he'd been about three seconds away from telling Maka that if that was her goal she had the wrong scythe, but...

Yeah,  _but_. Soul wasn't sure what it was that compelled him to stay. Maybe it was that he didn't really have any experience yet, so he didn't know if he'd actually be any good at this or not, and cool guys didn't give up without trying (right?). Maybe it was because this was a team thing, so if they failed the blame wasn't all on him (even though it still totally would be because he hadn't known her very long but he could already tell that Maka Albarn didn't fail at  _anything_ ).

Mostly though, he was pretty sure it was because he actually kind of liked this weird bookish girl. She was  _nice_. More importantly, she seemed to genuinely like him, as well. He couldn't figure out why, but she did. She was nice to everybody, but he'd watched her and he'd figured out the difference between "nice because I was raised to be polite" and "nice because I genuinely like you and enjoy your company." And for some reason or another, she seemed to have taken a liking to him. It was a weird feeling, having someone so genuinely interested in him, maybe a little bit uncomfortable because he wasn't used to this, but it wasn't necessarily bad either. She'd listened to him play, heard the mad deranged melodies he created and his stupid,  _stupid_  use of discordant harmonic progressions that made everyone else cringe, and she had stuck around. It was a first, and there was no way in hell he would ever let her know how much that had meant to him. So how could he push away the one person who didn't seem to give a damn that he was all twisted up inside and sucked at everything?

Besides, he had a lifetime's worth of experience in not living up to peoples' expectations of him. How bad could failing to become a death scythe be, anyway?


	6. Phase

School life at Shibusen, Soul quickly discovered, was not at all like school life at a regular middle school. Part of it was the age difference between many of the students. Although meisters were restricted to entering the school at either the middle school level, around ten or eleven years old, or the high school level at fourteen, weapons were encouraged to apply as soon as their skill manifested, whether this be at age three or age thirty.

He learned that this was largely because the number of individuals with meister-caliber souls in the world greatly outnumbered the number of individuals whose weapon gene had manifested, and therefore the entry requirements for meisters were much more stringent and selective. Typically more meisters were accepted than weapons, if only to improve the chances of each weapon finding a technician whose soul was compatible with theirs. Even so, only high-potential meisters were admitted, whereas any weapon of any skill level would be accepted without question. This was largely because a weapon's very nature made him or her dangerous, some types more than others. A huge function of Shibusen in the lives of that half of their students was to ensure that they wouldn't accidentally hurt themselves or others, regardless of whether they chose to pursue a career as a weapon. Soul could appreciate this, having more than once accidentally cut himself on his own blades.

Because of this, although the age range of student meisters in the academy ran from about ten to nineteen, there were a broad spectrum of weapons. The youngest Soul had seen yet was a five-year-old demon javelin, and the oldest (as far as he knew) was a middle aged woman whose weapon form hadn't manifested until unusually late in life.

The end result was that academics could be a bit chaotic at times. The best effort was made to keep a curriculum suitable to students' needs, but it wasn't a perfect system. Still, as Soul and Maka were "traditional" students, both entering the school at more or less the usual age, they weren't as impacted by the organized chaos as some of their peers.

Up to a point, it wasn't really that much different from the private school Soul had attended until now. They still received a standard education: math, science, the language arts, typical stuff. When it came to physical education things started to deviate from what he was used to. The P.E. program taught at Shibusen was both far more rigorous and far more combat-oriented than anything Soul had ever seen. Meisters in particular were expected to always be in peak physical condition, but the physical expectations on weapons weren't exactly low, either, and until he began to get used to the training regimen Soul left the academy every day with aching sore muscles.

Beyond the standard academics, however, Shibusen had an additional component: the training that would prepare each weapon/meister team to collect the corrupted souls of the wicked.

Phasmology wasn't especially engaging, as far as Soul was concerned. The scientific study of souls was definitely interesting- way more interesting than quadratic equations at any rate- but the practical aspect of their training was more his speed. Or at least, it would have been if he could get the hang of his weapon form.

It was surprisingly difficult. He'd gotten to the point that he could easily phase his limbs back and forth between human flesh and razor-sharp blades at will, but he had yet to manage a full body transformation. He'd been told it was normal for him to have difficulty, and that given he'd only known he was a weapon since June, it wasn't expected that he be able to fully transform right away. He also knew he wasn't the only weapon still struggling, but it was frustrating. He felt like he was miles behind most of his classmates, and it was driving him nuts because it was too much like what he'd flown all the way across the country to escape. He hadn't escaped from Wes's shadow just to come in second-best to seventy or eighty other weapons!

Impending failure as a weapon was bad enough, but the fact that his partner was so  _good_  just made it worse. Soul had to admit, he was a little bit in awe of Maka. He was new to the world of weapons and meisters, but he didn't need years of experience to see that his technician was born for this life. In his opinion, anyone who thought otherwise had probably been dropped on their head a few too many times as a baby.

She had started training in gymnastics when she was three, not a day older than he had been when he'd first been set to studying piano, and being the daughter of Death Scythe and the meister who had trained him had given her years of secondhand experience. She practiced basic contact material daily, preparing with the practice staffs in one of the training rooms for the day she would wield a real weapon... preparing for  _him_.

And he, meanwhile, couldn't even manage to transform properly. He'd been assigned extra practice after regular school hours, along with four other weapons who were having difficulties. The difference between himself and the other stragglers, however, was that none of them were partnered. None of them had yet found a technician whose soul was compatible enough to attempt the bonding process, so they weren't holding anyone back with their failure.

On the plus side, the extra lessons gave him the opportunity to meet a demon lantern named Jacqueline Dupré, the first person at Shibusen besides Maka, Black*Star, and Tsubaki that he actually thought he might be able to be friends- or at least friendly- with. She was a few years older, and was helping Nygus teach the younger weapons who were still having difficulty, and Soul always felt better under her guidance than under Nygus's unsettling eagle-eyed watch. She appreciated sarcasm and knew when to shut up, and from what little she'd said about herself— she was the youngest daughter of a Native American family  out of eastern Canada with a prestigious history as weapons, and she was generally considered to be the shame of the family for her "useless" weapon form— he kind of suspected they had a few things in common.

Less positive were the pitying looks that kept being sent Maka's way as she sat on the sidelines and observed his practice sessions. He'd tried to let her know that she didn't need to keep sitting in and that he'd be just fine without her there, but she either didn't get the hint or decided to ignore it because she kept coming, and people kept giving her those looks that said " _poor girl, jumped in without checking the water level first and now she's stuck with a defective weapon._ " She didn't seem to realize it, but  _how could she not notice_  she was being judged and pitied by everyone for saddling herself with him? How did she manage to ignore their eyes on her?

He didn't understand why she hadn't swapped out. There were unpaired weapons still, like the demon sword a few months younger than her who wasn't having any difficulty at all with a full transformation. For a beginner, Maka was already a good meister, and no one in their right mind would refuse her as a partner. Being so friendly and open, she probably wouldn't have any difficulty forming a soul bond with some other weapon. She didn't need him. The fact that she was still being patient while he struggled defied logic.

It all came to a head in early October, when Soul decided to stay even later, after the rest of his remedial group had been dismissed for the evening. He had frayed himself down to his last nerve and he was determined to either improve before he was kicked out for the night or just give up and go back to Connecticut.

It was well after seven o'clock, and the small gymnasium was lit by only one of the four banks of lights that lined the ceiling. Maka sat watching from the bleachers, still stubbornly refusing to just go home and leave him to it. She sat beside Nygus, who had been appointed as the coach for the remedial study group. Soul felt self-conscious under their watching eyes, but he was used to that.

 _Feel the weapon inside you_ , he thought. It was advice he'd heard a thousand times in the last few weeks, and he still couldn't seem to translate the concept into results.

Soul closed his eyes and breathed deep, focusing on the feeling of steel replacing flesh, and...

He looked down, and his arms had shifted effortlessly into a pair of twin blades at the shoulder, but the rest of his body remained stubbornly human. He blew air out his nose in a huff of frustration and phased back.

"Try a physical motion," Nygus suggested from close behind him, startling him. He hadn't realized she'd left her place on the bleachers to stand near him. "That helped Micah quite a lot, remember?"

"Yeah, I remember," he said.

"Well, go on, give it a try."

Soul rolled his shoulders awkwardly. "What should I do?"

Nygus smiled sympathetically, and he wished she would look away. "Just do whatever feels comfortable," she said. "You're a weapon, Soul. This transformation is innate to you even if you're struggling with it. The method you use to learn should feel natural. Watch-"

To demonstrate, she took a few quick steps then launched herself into a handspring. In midair she transformed effortlessly into a gleaming fixed-blade combat knife and twirled through the air to stick, quivering, into the gym mats lining the wall. Another instant later and she had shifted back into her human shape, dropping into a graceful crouch before climbing back to her feet.

"Um... I'm, uh, pretty sure I can't do anything like that," Soul pointed out. Maka might be able to do big elaborate flips in midair, but that definitely wasn't his forte.

Nygus nodded. "That's just an example. That's what  _I_  feel most comfortable with. You need to figure out what feels best for  _you_. Being in motion like that can help to streamline your transformation. It takes your mind off shifting your form and makes it more instinctive."

"Streamlined, huh?"

"Yep. Eventually you'll be as comfortable in your weapon form as you are in your human skin," Nygus affirmed.

Soul had to resist the urge to laugh out loud. How the hell was he supposed to do that, when he was pretty sure he didn't even know what it was like to be comfortable in his own skin? There had to be some easier way to do this. Except, unfortunately, he knew there wasn't. He had to figure it out or admit that he just wasn't good enough to be a weapon, either.

"Okay," he said, more to himself than to the older woman.

_Eyes closed. Breathe. What feels comfortable? Is it supposed to be some kind of expression of who I am or something? Damn, I don't even know that. Breathe. Okay._

It was obvious that there was something in his head that was blocking him from getting this right, but what? Soul had always been introspective, so a little soul-searching to pinpoint the root of the problem shouldn't be too hard. This phasing thing was supposed to be some combination of instinct and muscle memory, right? Just like improvisation and scales, no big deal.

Without being fully aware of it, he had tuned into the flow of melody in the back of his head. It was a constant in his life, had been as long as he could remember; he had never been without a song in his head and it was the one thing he was certain of in the world. He flexed his fingers, feeling the spread of a phantom keyboard beneath his hands as he let himself be caught up in the music. He might be a mediocre pianist and a failure as a weapon, but  _this_  was right.  _This_  was real.  _This_  was something he couldn't doubt.

His music had always been bigger and better than him. He was just the channel it flowed through to emerge into the world, and he might be a flawed vessel incapable of expressing the music in his head the way it deserved, but that was  _his_  flaw. There was nothing wrong with his songs in and of themselves. If he needed something comfortable, this was it.

The tingling rush he had come to associate with transformation flooded through him, and Soul opened his eyes.

The perspective was all wrong, he realized. He was staring up at the ceiling, even though he was pretty sure he'd been standing just a moment ago. It took him a moment to reorient himself, but when Nygus's face moved into his range of vision, he understood quite suddenly that this was it.

He'd done it.

It was the strangest thing Soul had ever experienced. The duality of his own existence hit him very abruptly. The twin truths of his physical form had baffled him up until this exact moment, but now it all made a bizarre kind of sense. He felt connected to the scythe-body. He could feel himself rest against the cool padded floor of the gymnasium, although the sensation was curiously numbed. Despite that, he still felt somehow detached as well, his consciousness manifest in some nether-space within himself. He was the scythe, and the scythe was him. Simple, really. Now that he could feel this, he couldn't comprehend how it had taken him so long to work this out.

"Well done, Soul," Nygus said, with a small smile and an approving nod. "You've gotten past the hard part, and this'll just get easier from here on out. Can you shift back?"

Well, it'd be pretty damn embarrassing if he managed to get himself stuck as a scythe, wouldn't it? He reached out mentally, seeking the way to reverse what he'd done.

Easy as breathing, Soul transformed back into familiar flesh and bone, ending up crouching on the gym mats where he'd been lying in his other form. He stared down the length of his body, which felt a bit sore and strained but also  _amazing._

Nygus offered her hand to help him up, and when he grasped it she pulled him to his feet.

Before he'd even quite managed to reorient himself to being vertical, Maka had come flying out of nowhere and her arms were around his neck.

"You did it, Soul!" she exclaimed, and he could  _hear_  her smiling. "I knew you could do it!"

He stood stiff for a moment in pure shock at the unexpected hug, then tentatively put one arm around her shoulders in return. She was practically wiggling from excitement, and it was infectious.

As Maka continued to do her best imitation of a python around his neck and babbled about how proud she was of him and all the work she was going to have to do to get used to his weight and the added complication of maneuvering the blade, a broad grin grew slowly on Soul's face.

_Maybe not so defective after all._


	7. Fidelity

Soul was just leaving the supermarket with an armload of sugary deliciousness which he fully intended to survive on for the next week or so when he caught sight of a flash of red hair. He was about to slip around the corner in order to escape the notice of a certain death scythe when he got a better look at what he was actually seeing, and stopped dead in his tracks.

Spirit Albarn was not Soul's favorite person in the world. Their first meeting had gone well, but he hadn't been Maka's partner then, and as for their second encounter...  _well_. Let's just say there were some things best forgotten. The man was overprotective to the point of paranoia, enthusiastic to the point of thoughtlessness, and almost stupidly energetic (rather like his daughter, actually).

Most importantly, however, he clearly had it out for Soul. He was almost painfully blatant in his distaste for the younger scythe and had gone out of his way to make Soul's school life hell. He hadn't been successful, but that was mostly due to Maka's intervention. The death scythe's interference had amounted to very little, but  _had_  earned him more than a few painful blows to the head courtesy of his feisty daughter. Soul's ever-growing respect for his partner couldn't help but ratchet up a few notches every time she defended him like this. She took his side against her father almost always, even in those circumstances where he maybe kinda-sorta deserved Spirit's wrath (because yeah, the dude was annoying and he might or might not have been known to provoke him occasionally), and it was more reassuring than he would have thought. But the fact that she was proving to be unbelievably cool wasn't the point. The point was that Spirit Albarn was kind of a dick.

Now, though, Soul had an entirely new reason to scorn his partner's father. Across the street, Spirit was chatting up a pretty woman with gusto. It wouldn't have been out of the ordinary, if the death scythe weren't very much married... and the woman in question weren't very much  _not_  Maka's mother.

It had taken an uncommonly long time for Soul to meet Maka's mom, considering she lived right in Death City. Maka had been eager for him to meet her, but every time she attempted to bring him home with her after school or arrange a meeting some other time, Rei Albarn canceled. She had a meeting, she had a mission, an old school friend she hadn't seen in years was suddenly back in town for just a few days and she had to work around their schedule in order to visit them... after a few months of this, Soul had begun to wonder if the woman even really existed.

Eventually, though, he had finally gotten to meet her. Rei Albarn was practically a mirror image of her daughter with the exception of her raven hair and darker skin, and the buxom blonde across the street bore no resemblance whatsoever to the petite Japanese woman Maka had enthusiastically introduced as her mother.

Soul couldn't help but stare at Spirit, hoping desperately for Maka's sake that he was misreading what he was seeing.

The young man's posture was casual, leaning his left wrist above his head against the stucco wall beside him to support his weight, left ankle casually crossed over his right and scraping absently at the concrete with the toe of his shiny black shoe (Soul scoffed- he was gonna scuff perfectly good Italian leather doing that). A light smile played across his lips as whatever comment he'd made drew a laugh from the blonde, who threw her head back to toss her falls of sunshine hair over her shoulder in a move that even a not-quite-twelve-year-old could recognize as seductive. Spirit's grin widened and he leaned close, whispering intimately in the woman's ear. The woman leaned back to meet his eyes, nodding eagerly.

The ivory-haired scythe could only stare in shock as Spirit slipped an arm around his companion's waist, hand riding dangerously low on her hip, and guided her around a corner.

What the  _hell_  had he just witnessed?

* * *

Soul was behaving... oddly.

Well, oddly for him. Maka had come to the understanding that her weapon was a complete weirdo, regardless of his (loud, frequent) proclamations that he was a "cool guy." As irritating as he could be, the vast library of quirks she was gradually discovering about him were kind of endearing.

Less endearing was his twitchy behavior for the last couple of days. Half the time he seemed lost in thought, and the rest of the time he was staring at her intensely with a look on his face that she couldn't read for the life of her. Whenever she caught him looking he immediately glanced away. If she tried to talk to him when he was so focused on whatever was going on in his head that he was practically staring  _through_  whatever he happened to be looking at at the time, it took her three tries to get his attention- and when she finally did, he was usually so startled he all but jumped out of his skin. It was downright bizarre.

Maka was many things, but a patient girl was not necessarily one of them. It wasn't surprising, therefore, that she got fed up with her weapon's odd change in behavior quite quickly.

She hit her limit when they were hanging out in one of Death City's municipal parks. After school they had met up with Black*Star and Tsubaki for a few hours, but the ninja and his demure weapon had returned to the Shibusen dormitory designated for coed partners shortly before five, leaving Maka and Soul to their own devices. Maka had plopped down on a bench beside the walking path and pulled out her copy of Moby Dick. Soul had sat beside her and indicated that he was perfectly content to sit and people-watch while she read... only it seemed that when he said "people-watch" he actually meant stare at her surreptitiously out of the corner of his eye.

After the third time she glanced back at him only to have him look away as if his eyes would fall out if they met hers, she shut her book with a snap. "Why do you keep staring at me?" she barked.

"I'm not staring," he mumbled.

"Yes you are. You keep looking away every time I look at you and you're twitchier than a squirrel with an energy drink!"

Soul raised an eyebrow but didn't respond.

"Come on, Soul, what's bugging you?"

"Nothin'."

A horrible suspicion entered into Maka's young mind, and the instant the idea occurred to her she was already mentally berating herself for choosing a male partner and allowing this to happen. "What, do you have a crush on me or something?"

Soul's reaction was nothing short of horrified. "What?" he blurted out, sitting up straight as if he'd been given an electric shock. "Ew! No! Jeez, no way! For one thing, you're way too young for me-"

"Am not!"

"Seriously, Maka, you're  _ten_."

"So?"

"So I'm like a year and a half older than you, that would be weird! And for another thing... seriously?" He raised a pale eyebrow. "A cool guy like me, liking a bookworm like you? Fat chance."

Maka couldn't for the life of her work out why she was so bothered by his response. She was glad her weapon didn't  _like_  like her! That would have been a disaster, and everything would have gotten awkward and weird because there was absolutely  _no way_  she was making the same mistake her mama had made. And besides, even if she did decide someday to give some guy a shot (she wouldn't, but hypothetically speaking it was possible, in the same way a meteorite crashing into Death City tomorrow was technically possible), it definitely wouldn't be sarcastic, shark-toothed, irritating  _Soul_. No, even if she did someday decide she wanted a boyfriend, he would have to be someone kind and gentle and brave and intelligent. Someone with a little refinement and a sense of decorum. Soul "I bet I can fit six donuts in my mouth without choking" Eater definitely did not fit the bill.

"You're such a jerk!" She smacked him in the shoulder, hard enough that he wince.

"Ow! Hey!"

She stuck her nose in the air. "You asked for it...  _jerk_."

He continued to rub at his injured shoulder and grumbled, "How does somebody so tiny hit so hard?"

"Maybe that'll teach you not to insult people."

Soul shrugged. "I don't see why you're being all weird about it. Given all the weapon abuse going on I'd assume you wouldn't want me to like you, y'know,  _like that_. I mean, jeez, I'm your _partner!_  Isn't there some kinda rule about that?"

Maka tilted her head thoughtfully. "Not really. You're definitely right that there's no way that it'll  _ever_  be relevant to us, but there's no official rules against weapons and meisters dating. It's not encouraged or anything, but it's not frowned on either. I mean... look at my parents."

Soul rubbed the back of his neck, suddenly looking very uncomfortable. "Yeah... your parents..." he mumbled. His tone caught Maka's attention and she zeroed in on him. Hie stared intently at the sandy soil beneath their feet. His expression was otherwise hard to read, but his eyes clued her in to some inner turbulence.

The suspicion that something of actual  _importance_  had been bothering him occurred to her, and in a slightly gentler tone she asked, "Seriously, Soul, what's up? You've been acting weird for a couple of days now."

He looked back at her, visibly conflicted, worrying at his lower lip with those curiously sharp teeth of his. She waited patiently (for her) as he struggled with whatever was on his mind. It wouldn't take very long, if the nervous way his fingers were tapping against the wood of the park bench were any indication.

"I uh... um... I'm not sure if I should tell you," Soul said. "I-It's really none of my business and I'm not even totally sure if I saw what I thought I saw so I wouldn't want to make trouble if I misunderstood what was going on or-"

"Soul," she interrupted firmly, "just spit it out."

He heaved a sigh, shoulders slumping in defeat. "The other day I happened to see your dad around the city, and he was kind of... well, the thing is, he was with this woman, and it wasn't your mother, and... uh, like I said, maybe I just misunderstood and I'm making a big deal out of nothing, but it kinda looked like-"

"Like my papa is a cheating bastard?" Maka finished for him.

Soul nodded.

Maka let out a sigh of her own. "It's funny," she said bitterly, "I'm not even surprised any more."

Soul's eyes practically bugged out of his head. "You mean you  _know?_ " he sputtered.

She hated that this conversation was happening. Her father cheating on her mother with his endless train of girlfriends, and on his girlfriends with his mistresses, and on his mistresses with various one night stands, and so on and so forth... it was something she'd been aware of as far back as she could remember _._  She had learned firsthand that there was no such thing as a happy relationship and no such thing as a trustworthy man. Black*Star came close, but he wasn't really a  _boy_  so much as he was a... Black*Star.

As awful as the entire male species had repeatedly proven itself to be though, her papa was always the worst of the bunch. It was so embarrassing, knowing that the biggest cheater in Death City- maybe the biggest cheater in all of Nevada, a state which did in fact happen to include Las Vegas- was the man who'd broken her mama's heart so many times even Maka couldn't count that high. She didn't want to talk about this.

But...

She eyed Soul speculatively. Soul was her partner, after all. In just a few months when the spring semester started, they would begin resonance training and they would be intimately acquainted with each others' souls. They had to be able to rely on each other. This kind of partnership demanded a certain level of trust in each other. And sure, Soul hadn't told her much (or anything, really) about who he had been before enrolling at Shibusen, not even his real name (because she wasn't gullible enough to think that  _Soul Eater_  was really his name, especially given the occasional practice Shibusen students had of changing their names or adopting nicknames when they came to the school). But someone had to take the plunge first and entrust the other with their secrets, right? If they didn't start to open up to each other now, the option of doing so on their own terms would be taken away from them once they began to resonate.

"Yeah," she said at last. "I know. Look, can we not talk about this here?"

"Uh, sure?"

She nodded. "Okay, let's go back to your apartment."

* * *

Maka was as uncomfortable as he had ever seen her. She was perched delicately on the edge of his couch, fidgeting awkwardly with her fingers twisting in the hem of her skirt. After several months' worth of partnership, Soul had thought he knew her pretty well, because she was ridiculously easy to read. Watching the ordinarily poised and ready-for-anything Maka looking miserable and nervous was strange. The tension she was single-handedly filling the room with made him itch.

"Uh, you want anything to eat?" he offered hesitantly. He might have left Connecticut, but he couldn't shake what his mother might have referred to as "good breeding" quite so easily. He'd always been terrible at putting people at ease, but he had at least been taught how to be polite.

She shook her head mutely, pigtails swinging.

"You sure?"

"No, I'm fine, thanks." She drew in a fortifying lungful of air, then expelled it, forcing the tension from her shoulders. "So, this isn't something I've ever told anybody about before. I..."

Seeing that nervousness creep back into her expression as she trailed off uncertainly, Soul said, "No one's gonna hear about it from me."

At the way her face relaxed marginally, he knew he had read her right.

"My papa has been cheating on my mama for a long time," she said bluntly.

"With who?" Soul asked. "What's her name?" He was genuinely curious. He had only met Rei Albarn once but she seemed like a really impressive woman. She certainly put  _his_  mother to shame. And admittedly, the blonde he'd seen had been hot and all, but he was having a hard time understanding Spirit's reasoning.

Maka, however, just laughed. Bitterly. "I don't know. What did she look like this week? Blonde? Brunette? Honestly, it might be easier to list who he  _hasn't_  cheated with."

Soul had to work to conceal his stunned reaction. "So... he does this a lot, then."

"He never stops."

He scoffed. "Just figures," he muttered. "One more reason to dislike the guy." He wasn't sure he should press it. Maka looked so  _sad_  and that was new, because although she was the kind of person who wore her emotions on her sleeve and he'd seen her happy and tired and hyper and angry (lots of angry) and in full-on Nerd Mode (which in his opinion was an emotion in and of itself), this was the very first time he had ever seen her sad. It didn't take him long to decide that he didn't like it at all. So yeah, he probably should just make the smart move and drop it.

No one ever said he was the brightest bulb in the bunch, though.

"Does your mom know?"

She nodded. "I think she knew before I did. Papa's not the best at covering his tracks or being subtle. That's-" Her voice cracked and she paused to take a breath. Oh shit, was she  _crying?_ No, thank Death, not yet, but he was pretty sure that was a direction this conversation would go and Soul really didn't know how to handle a crying girl. Especially since this was  _Maka_ , and up until about ten seconds ago, he hadn't thought she even knew how to cry.

But she had steadied her voice and her breathing and was pressing onward, her brow furrowed angrily as she attempted to glare a hole through his carpet. "That's why Mama's gone all the time, I think. She takes a lot of missions all over the world, and she goes back to Japan to visit my grandparents a lot. If she's gone, at least she doesn't have to- to see him, you know?"

"Wow," Soul murmured. He didn't know what else to say.

Maka flopped tiredly against the back of the sofa. "I hate it," she said quietly.

"No kidding."

"Why do men have to be such cheating jerkbags?"

It was rhetorical, but the angry way she said it was at such a dramatic contrast with the sad look in her eyes that he couldn't help but respond: "I can't answer that one for you. Cheating is seriously uncool."

She turned her head, resting her cheek on the back of the couch to offer him a half-assed attempt at a smile. "Tell me about it."

He returned her smile as best he could, thinking hard. Up until now he'd kind of envied Maka's family life, because her father clearly (and loudly) adored her and her mother might be quiet about it but it was clear that she loved her daughter, too. He didn't feel quite so envious anymore, now that he knew how it was between her parents.

Some of Black*Star's weird comments about how strange it was that Maka had partnered with a guy (something he'd remarked on rather extensively during the first couple weeks of class, to Soul's consternation) made a lot more sense. If Maka hadn't had some issues with guys after growing up with a father like that, it would've been nothing short of a miracle.

Soul was way too familiar with daddy issues of various kinds. Having grown up as an unusually observant child among the wealthy upper tiers of Hartford society, he'd been privy to a lot of peoples' family drama. Hell, he wasn't entirely certain that he didn't have some issues thanks to his relationship (if it could be called that) with his own father! He had seen girls his brother's age going around with men more than old enough to be their fathers. He had heard about girls who rebelled and acted out and ended up stuck in rehab in their quest for attention. There were all kinds of ways girls dealt with their absent or hurtful parents. And Maka...

Maka had settled on hating guys, if he was putting the puzzle pieces together correctly (which he was pretty much positive he was). The thought made him unaccountably sad. She'd been given one lousy example and projected that hurt onto an entire gender.

Ignoring the thought that he was starting to sound a bit like the therapist his parents had sent him to, Soul came to a decision. He was not going to let Spirit Albarn wreck Maka's life. He wasn't entirely sure how he planned to accomplish this, but it was his resolution. Even if she was violent and nerdy and kind of a pain in his ass, Maka was undeniably cool, and she didn't deserve that kind of treatment.

He felt like he should say something sincere and meaningful or at least sympathetic or  _something_ , but he kept coming up empty, so instead he just asked: "So... you wanna order Chinese and watch cartoons until curfew?"

When a big smile spread across Maka's face, though, Soul kind of felt like he'd said the right thing after all.


	8. Sanctuary

Knowing Maka's secret (which admittedly wasn't much of a secret, because Spirit Albarn sucked at subtlety, but at least their peers hadn't yet worked out that Death Scythe was the biggest manwhore in the city) helped clarify a lot for Soul. Like why his meister's mother was never around, for instance. Mrs. Albarn's radio silence made a lot more sense once he realized she was trying to avoid her scummy husband. It also explained why Maka had the fashion sense of a distressed llama. Based on the families his parents had associated with, Soul was pretty sure that was the kind of things girls usually learned from their mothers, so it was no wonder Maka was a little lacking in that department, if her mother was always out of town.

It had been surprising, to say the least, to get that insight into her home life. It wasn't at all what he would have expected, given how cheerful and perky Maka was all the time (although it did go a long way towards explaining why she was so  _driven_ ). Just went to show, he supposed, that no family was perfect.

Well, that wasn't quite true. After all, the  _Evans family_  was, he just sucked at living up to the standard and ruined it for the rest of them. But that wasn't going to be an issue any more.

Regardless, he was glad he'd stumbled across the skeleton in the Albarn family closet. It would have sounded weird and completely uncool if he'd tried to explain it out loud, but it was true. As nice as she had been to him (when she wasn't smacking him for pointing out the painfully obvious, anyway), Soul had viewed her as sort of a distant, untouchable being. Maka did a very good job of appearing superhuman, and up until she'd confessed the truth about her father, he'd bought the facade. Now he saw her as a real person, with actual weaknesses and hangups. Strange though it might seem, he felt closer to his technician.

For what he thought might be the first time in his life, Soul had a  _friend_.

Admittedly, she was a weird, nerdy, violent friend who was way too hung up on homework for it to be healthy, but she was a friend nonetheless. It might be a friendship of convenience, since they were partners and all, but it was still genuine. And that, Soul decided, felt really good.

Beyond the insight it provided into Maka's character, though, Soul didn't think much about Spirit Albarn's philandering beyond cataloging it as just one more reason to dislike the guy. At least, he didn't until almost a month later.

It was a week before Thanksgiving, two before Soul's birthday, when a pounding on his apartment door late at night roused him from a light doze. Rubbing sleepily at his eye with the heel of his palm, he stumbled out of his bedroom, grumbling under his breath about people not respecting decent hours. He yanked the door open, about to give whoever thought it was a good idea to knock at this hour a piece of his mind, only to find his partner standing in the hall.

He blinked.

Maka looked up at him with red-rimmed eyes and offered him a quivering attempt at a smile. "Hey," she mumbled.

Soul stared at her for another second, then blurted out, "You look like a drowned rabbit."

Which, technically, was true. It wasn't raining especially hard outside but she was drenched to the skin and her pigtails were drooping pathetically, dripping on the carpet. She was barefoot and wearing a matching pajama set featuring pink ducklings. But no matter how pathetic she looked, Soul realized even as the words were coming out of his mouth that antagonizing her was a bad idea. He waited for her to hit him or something... but the smack he was expecting never came.

"It's like eleven-thirty," he told her when it became apparent that he wasn't going to be beaten into jelly. "What are you doing here, Maka?"

"Um... my parents are fighting," she said, voice cracking suspiciously.

"Oh."

She nodded, crossing her arms in front of herself and grasping her elbows tightly, staring off at the trail of damp footprints she had left in the hall. "Yeah. Uh, my mom was out of town and Papa brought... he brought one of his girls back to the house, and then Mama got home early and..."

" _Oh_."

If such a thing had happened in the Evans household, Soul knew there would have been no theatrics, just passive-aggressive sneering and slow-simmering loathing, because there was always the risk that the neighbors would overhear a shouting match and there was no sense causing a scene. But the Albarns were not the Evanses, and he was willing to bet that things worked a little differently for them.

"They've been yelling for hours and I just couldn't take it any more so I snuck out but it was raining and everywhere was closed except the laundromat and I couldn't think of anywhere else to go so I just came here and-" She sucked in a deep breath, steadying herself, for which Soul was grateful because she looked dangerously close to crying and he really,  _really_  didn't want to deal with that.

"Could I maybe stay here tonight?" she asked tentatively.

He didn't even have to think about it. "Sure, whatever." He stood aside to let her enter the apartment.

Once she crossed the threshold, she stood blankly just inside the doorway, staring around her vacantly. A droplet of rainwater slid from her forehead down to the tip of her nose, but she didn't seem to notice. Whether her vacant expression was because it was late and she was tired or because of whatever she had overheard at home, he didn't know, but she didn't even seem to realize she was soaked and shivering.

Soul restrained a sigh of mild exasperation.

"Don't go walking around in the rain, idiot. You'll get sick or somethin'."

"You can't get sick from being out in bad weather," she said automatically. "Being out in the cold for a long time can lower your immune responses to-"

"Yeah, yeah, encyclopaedia-brain, I get it. But you're dripping on my floor. I'll get you something to change into, okay?"

She nodded, and Soul hurried to his room. As he grabbed one of his t-shirts and an old pair of sweatpants that he really hoped would fit on his tiny partner, he made a mental note to kick Spirit Albarn's ass once he was tall enough to actually do it. What kind of bastard actually brought the girl he was cheating with back to his house? The one lesson his father had taught him that Soul actually considered valuable was that cheating was the lowest, scummiest form of betrayal there was.  _Seriously_  uncool. But at least back in Connecticut the men who were getting a bit on the side had the courtesy to take their mistresses to a hotel or on a "business trip." Infidelity was bad enough, but the fact that Spirit had the gall (or just the lack of brainpower, whichever) to flaunt it like that...

Yeah, he was definitely giving that dude a black eye when he was a little older.

Returning to the hall, Soul found Maka still standing where he had left her. She was staring down to where a muddy little puddle was collecting around her feet.

"Aw man, you made a mess," he grumbled.

She startled at the sound of his voice. "Oh! Sorry, I'll clean it up."

"Nah, don't worry about it," he said with a shrug. "I'll take care of it. Here, you can sleep in this." He shoved the bundle of clothes into her hands. "You know where the bathroom is."

She nodded and, silent as a ghost, drifted down the hall to change out of her wet clothing. Soul made the executive decision that the damp spot on the linoleum could wait until later, and crossed the open floor plan to the area that served as the kitchen. He leaned against the counter, pondering what he should do next.

What exactly was expected of him in this situation? He had a strict "none of my business" policy towards everybody else's drama, he always left well enough alone. Except Maka was his _partner_ , and it had been drilled into his head enough times over the last several months that it was his responsibility to look out for her. So how the hell did he do that? Soul didn't know the first thing about how to comfort somebody in the first place, let alone navigating a complicated situation like this with a complicated person like Maka. Was he supposed to hug her or something? God, he hoped not. Maka was a very tactile person, but although being around her was slowly getting him accustomed to having his personal space invaded way more than he was used to, he wasn't sure he was up for randomly hugging her. It would probably be weird and awkward and he'd end up looking like an idiot. So uncool.

He settled for making cocoa. Lynette Evans had not been the most domestic of mothers, but she made kickass hot cocoa and she had taught both her sons her recipe. Since moving out on his own, Soul had made sure he always had the ingredients on hand, even though in the sweltering heat of Death Valley there wasn't much call for hot beverages.

Soul went about preparing the cocoa, listening absently to the sound of the hairdryer he had never used. By the time a warm, dry Maka emerged from the bathroom, he had a steaming mug ready for her. He wasn't sure if it was the right thing to do, but it was the best he could come up with under the circumstances because he was  _not_  hugging her.

"Here," he mumbled, shoving the mug into her hands.

She looked down at the cup in surprise. "What-?" She took a sip and her emerald eyes widened. "Wow, this is delicious!"

Soul bit down on his tongue to keep from grinning.

They drank their cocoa in silence at the kitchen table, then Soul lead her to the empty bedroom. He was very glad he hadn't gotten around to asking the landlord to move the bed that had come with the apartment out, because he  _really_  didn't want to sleep on the couch, and it would've been massively uncool to make Maka sleep out there.

He handed her a blanket and the spare pillow from his bed. "I thought I had a spare set of sheets, but I can't figure out where they are," he explained sheepishly. "So you'll just have to make do with this."

"Thanks, Soul."

"No problem. That's... what partners do. Right?"

She smiled at him, and he was pleased to see it actually reached her eyes. "I guess it is," she agreed. "Well... night, Soul."

"G'night."


	9. Roommates

They never really made the decision to move in together. It just sort of  _happened_.

After that first night of Maka crashing on a spare bed without sheets, Soul had more or less assumed that she would go back home once things had blown over between her folks. But maybe, looking back on it, he should have known better. The Albarns, apparently, were too wrapped up in their own drama to have even noticed that their daughter hadn't spent the night in her own bed. What Soul learned later was that in the early morning after hours of arguing, Rei had stormed out and headed straight for Death City airport, and her good-for-nothing husband had chased after her.

Soul had always known that his partner's parents were busy, important people and that she'd learned early in life to be pretty self-sufficient. He also knew that she wasn't used to being outright forgotten. It was weighing heavily on her slight shoulders, putting a damper on the spring she usually had in her step. Even her lame pigtails were drooping sadly that day. But he didn't know how to help her. He didn't know how to express his empathy for her without sounding sentimental and uncool, so he kept his mouth shut. All he could do for her was to simply not question it when she showed up at the apartment a few hours after school got out with a full duffel bag and empty eyes.

"Is it okay if I stay for a few more days?" she had asked.

He had nodded wordlessly and stood aside for her to come in. When she started unpacking her overnight bag, he saw that she had brought her own sheets.

And that was how it started. Piece by piece, Maka's belongings migrated from her bedroom at her parents' house to her bedroom at his apartment. It wasn't intentional, really. She just wasn't ready to go home yet, but she also wasn't going to live without the comforts of home, so she would stop off at the Albarn house for a few minutes after school or during their lunch hour to leave a note for her father and grab a few more necessities she had realized she just couldn't go without.

Soul wasn't complaining.

Well, actually, he was. Rather loudly and frequently, truth be told. Her hair clogged up the drain in the shower, her taste in music sucked, her stupid fruity-smelling lotion made him sneeze, she got in his face about leaving his stuff wherever he damn well felt like it in his own apartment, she managed to spread flour  _everywhere_  in the kitchen trying to bake a pie that he didn't even bother to pretend was edible... he had a long list of grievances associated with having to share a much smaller space than he was used to occupying in the first place.

Despite it all, though having Maka around all the time was nice. His privacy went out the window, but... he was never alone. It sounded contradictory, and if he tried to explain it to himself he felt like maybe he was even less sane than he'd thought, but he was quickly learning that that was how things were going to be with Maka as his partner. She was an annoyingly chipper pain in his neck, but it was impossible to feel lonely with her around. Not that he was going to tell her that, because the last thing he needed was Maka finding out just how much he actually enjoyed her nerdtastic presence in his home. Cool guys, he was pretty sure, didn't get all sentimental over stupid stuff like that.

Thanksgiving passed uncelebrated except for the disastrous attempt at pie. His birthday almost passed uncelebrated, but Maka had somehow found out when it was and made a slightly more successful attempt at cake (from a mix) and gave him a ridiculously bright-colored pair of socks that he swore he was never, ever going to wear and that she swore was a gag gift (he wasn't totally sure he believed her). November ended, December passed swiftly. Christmas was a subdued affair because Maka spent most of the day with Death Scythe for reasons Soul couldn't fathom, and New Years would have been a great deal more fun if Black*Star hadn't taken to belting out Auld Lang Syne (complete with made-up nonsense in place of the actual lyrics since he couldn't remember them) so far off-key Soul's ears were in danger of bleeding.

By the time January rolled around, they had both tacitly accepted the fact that they were now living together. Maka visited the post office to have her mail forwarded and submitted a change of address request to the Shibusen registry. Soul finally moved the two boxes of his random junk he hadn't known what to do with out of the room that had become hers and stashed them in his own closet. He bought a pipe snake for the shower drain, she got rid of the allergy-inducing lotion, and they made it work... with the proviso that she not try to bake anymore because while she could cook with the best of them, it was probably best if she left the baking up to him. After a few of the bickering matches that were becoming the norm for them, they managed to work out a system and settled into a domestic routine that Soul would have rather extracted his own teeth with rusty pliers before admitting he enjoyed.

And Rei Albarn still had not come back.

No one was totally sure where she had flown off to, but she didn't seem eager to let anybody else in on the secret. She had made one phone call to her husband to let him know she had arrived at her destination safely, and had not been in contact since.

Soul tried to pretend he didn't notice the way Maka's shoulders slumped just a little every time she checked the mail and found it devoid of anything but bills and junk mail.


	10. Reverse Birthday Gifts

Maka first started noticing something was amiss with her partner midway through January. Maybe it had been coming on for awhile before that and she just hadn't taken heed earlier, she wasn't sure. If Maka were less observant or Soul were better at hiding things from her, she might not have noticed at all, but as it stood she did eventually come to realize that not all was well.

Perhaps if they had known each other longer it would not have taken so long for her to notice, but they had only been partners for around half a year so she could be forgiven for not having a full understanding of her partner's character. The signs were subtle, however, and Soul was a private (Maka would have said secretive) person by nature, which made it far harder for her to spot the changes in his behavior.

She started noticing the bigger things first.

Her already quiet partner became positively taciturn, with the exception of when he was around Black*Star, at which times he seemed to feed off the other boy's boundless energy and become practically manic. Soul had always been fonder of sleeping than anyone she had ever met, but when his sleeping patterns started to change drastically, she took notice. When they had first started living together, she had noticed that he tended to be sluggish and practically non-functional in the morning, but the promise of food always got him up (he was nothing if not true to his name) and he nearly acted human once you'd gotten a cup of hot tea in him. As Death City's balmy approximation of winter dragged on, however, it became nearly impossible to drag him out of bed, and no matter how much sleep he got at night, he still ended up falling asleep in class more often than not.

Maka couldn't understand it, and reamed him out for making her take extra notes for him more than once...a  _week_. Her pestering didn't seem to motivate him in the slightest and only served to provoke arguments between them, but she couldn't just let it slide. As partners, their grades were calculated together, and she was absolutely not going to allow her slacker partner to ruin her academic record!

No matter what she said or how many times she smacked him upside the head to encourage him to do his work, however, she couldn't seem to get through to him. He'd brush her off with some snide remark (usually accompanied with a variation on his usual refrain of cool vs. uncool) and proceed to doze off or stare absently at the ceiling for a solid hour or some other time-wasting nonsense.

* * *

"I just don't get it," Maka said, dropping face-first into the enormous textbook spread open on the desk in front of her. "Soul's not stupid and he knows I don't mind helping him with his homework if he gets stuck. Why doesn't he just sit down and  _do_  it?"

Tsubaki looked down at the back of her friend's head. "I do not know, Maka-chan. Is there something specific he's having trouble with?"

Without lifting her face from where it was pressed into the crease of the pages, she shook her head. "No. He just won't do anything. I can hardly even get him to help with his half of the chores, and it was  _his_  apartment to begin with!"

They had had another fight earlier that day, which had led to Maka evacuating the premises to study with Tsubaki instead. Their fights were growing more frequent and more intense, and it had Maka deeply worried. Even though he was a boy, she had grown quite attached to Soul. He was a good person, she was pretty sure, and when he wasn't whining about how  _uncool_ everything was he was even really fun to spend time with. But these constant volcanic fights were hurting their fledgling partnership and if she didn't figure out how to fix it soon they might permanently limit the strength of their bond.

That was why she was spending more time talking to her friend than studying for once. Tsubaki was older. It made sense that she would have better insight into why boys were the way they were.

Maka sighed. "I don't know anymore, Tsubaki. He's just been so weird lately. It's not like the work we're doing in our classes is hard. So what's the problem?"

Tsubaki considered that for a moment before carefully replying, "Are you sure the problem is the schoolwork?"

The blonde sat up at last and looked curiously at Tsubaki. "What do you mean?"

She shrugged, cocking her head to the side thoughtfully. "It's just a thought. I don't know Soul-kun very well, of course, but it seems like from what you've told me that maybe there's something else affecting him. Maybe it will help to look at it from that angle. After all, as his partner, isn't it your duty to make sure he is in good health physically and mentally?" She blushed and looked down. "I'm sorry if that sounded judgmental. I didn't mean it like that. I know you do a good job of looking after Soul-kun already. I just-"

"I know, Tsubaki," Maka interrupted, smiling reassuringly at the older girl. "I knew what you were trying to say."

So saying, Maka fell silent, contemplating Tsubaki's advice.

The shadow weapon had a point. A partnership between weapon and meister was not a light matter. Even the short-term partnerships established between Shibusen students tracked for the NOT class- who weren't trained for kishin-hunting- which typically lasted only as long as the students involved were enrolled at the academy, were significant. They usually resulted in longstanding friendships even if the partnership was dissolved upon graduation. But she and Soul were tracked for the EAT class, destined to be combat-trained. They weren't just student partners, they were a soul-bonded pair. It was a material commitment and her end of that agreement demanded that she ensure her partner's well-being. Soul was to be a weapon in Lord Death's armory, so to speak, and it was her duty to make certain he was in top form.

So far, she reflected, she hadn't done a very good job. Alright,  _maybe_  she had let her temper rule her a little bit... but really it wasn't her fault that her weapon could be absolutely infuriating when he wanted to (which apparently was all the time). Still, she owed it to Soul and to their partnership to be a better meister.

It was time to take a step back and look at the bigger picture. Maybe if she could do as Tsubaki suggested and figure out if there was a larger issue troubling Soul, she would know better how to motivate him to be a better student.

* * *

It took Maka time, but she studied her partner closely and eventually began to see the pattern. Smaller cues in his behavior became clearer to her. His ordinary laziness and laid-back attitude had degenerated into outright apathy. Healthy skepticism had become negativity, and he was steadily growing more withdrawn than usual. And that was just the beginning.

Tsubaki had been right. Soul wasn't just slacking off on his schoolwork. Something was wrong.

Maka wanted to confront him openly about it, but they had only been partners for six months. They were still getting to know each other and she didn't know how far she could press him before he'd decide he'd had enough of being "nagged" as he put it. Maka didn't want to lose him as a partner because, loathe though she was to admit it, she knew the odds of finding another like Soul Eater were almost zero. Scythes were rare enough as it was. The chances of another one entering Shibusen while she was still a student were slim, and the chances that their souls would be compatible even if one did were even slimmer. Even if she managed to come across another scythe she had a prayer of resonating with... she didn't think she would like them as much. Something in her gut told her intuitively- had done so from day one- that there was something special about him. Something  _different_. She didn't know why she was so certain of this. Maybe it was some kind of meister's instinct. Maybe it was the song he'd played for her on their first meeting.

She still couldn't get his music out of her head. It had been a gruesome, dark melody, something unlike any other music she'd ever heard before. Maybe that was why it made sense to her, when so little music really did. It got to her, somehow.  _He_  got to her.

Eventually, it was this line of thinking that led her to a possible answer to her questions.

Soul was a gifted pianist. Even she could tell that after having heard him play only once. Music was clearly a big part of his life, if the fact that he spent more of his biweekly student allowance on records and CDs than he did on food and rent combined was any indication.

That was why, midway through March, Maka began studying music on the sly. She hoped to gain some insight into the way her partner's mind worked by trying to understand his fascination with music, and discreetly checked out a selection of books on the subject (which was a great deal more diverse than she had originally thought) from Shibusen's library. It was slow going. She waded through a music theory textbook, beating the science of harmonic progressions and chord inversions and meter into her brain. The functions themselves were easy to understand because they were concrete and regular. The esoteric applications that produced music, however... she didn't get it. But she kept at it straight through March and well into April, because Soul wasn't getting any better and she was getting increasingly frustrated trying to deal with him.

An answer came at last in the form of a slim little hardbound book on the subject of music therapy, specifically the psychological effects of listening to and performing music. She learned that although it was medically untested, it had been hypothesized that for subjects with a high degree of musical intelligence, a lack or reduction of musical engagement in their lives could contribute to episodes of major depressive disorder.

A little research into depression made Maka certain that she now knew what was wrong with her partner. She was no psychiatrist but when she could go down a list of symptoms and check off well over half of them, she figured she had to be on the right track.

The puzzle finally came together over the course of a few days as she pondered those two new pieces of information.

People didn't learn to play like Soul could on talent alone; she had learned that much from her research. Even for someone with a natural gift, it took years of training and hard practice to gain real skill. And Soul hadn't even been twelve years old yet when he arrived at Shibusen. He didn't have to tell her one single thing about his life before they'd met for her to work out that studying music had been important to him for a long time.

For some reason, though, he appeared to have no intention of sticking with it. Soul, Maka reflected, had not to her knowledge so much as touched a piano since the day they had met. Once they had even been passing through Shibusen's performing arts wing during a free period and she had suggested that he might like to take a detour to the piano studio. Soul had rejected the idea curtly, and she hadn't brought it up again.

Maka couldn't really understand why. If she had an amazing talent like that, she would use it. Whatever his reasons, though, Soul just didn't seem to want to.

Unless she could get him to explain why he wouldn't go within fifty feet of a piano, Maka just wasn't going to be able to figure out what his issue was. Still, it was her duty as a meister to make sure that Soul was in good health, both physically and mentally.

Instinctively she knew that if she tried to bring up the issue directly or try to talk him into seeing the school therapist, he was likely to withdraw even more. Soul didn't strike her as a talk-about-his-feelings kind of person. She was going to have to be subtle about this and try to deal with it quietly if possible. If that didn't work and she was out of options she would consider stronger measures but she would try simpler means first.

She thought about the matter for several days and a plan began to take shape in her mind.

* * *

"What's this?"

Soul stared at the object Maka had just handed him in utter consternation.

"What does it look like?" she asked with just the barest hint of sarcasm.

"It's a guitar," he replied uncomprehendingly. "With a bow around the neck."

"Very observant of you."

He looked up at her, taking in the smug little quirk of her mouth and the way her green eyes were dancing eagerly. She was freakishly enthusiastic about giving him an acoustic guitar, of all things. Something weird was going on.

"Uh... aren't you usually supposed to get presents on your birthday, not _give_  them?" He gestured to the copy of Jane Austen's  _Emma_  he had handed off to her before she'd shoved an instrument at him. He'd figured it was the kind of girly crap she'd be into reading (but then again, she also read Kurt Vonnegut so who knew with her?) and he didn't really know what else to get for her birthday.

Maka shrugged, trying and failing to completely hide how pleased she was with herself. "I just wanted to," she said. "Call it an impulse."

"You're not usually an impulse spender," he pointed out, "and guitars aren't expensive but they're not something you pick up on a whim either."

"Oh can't you just shut up and say thank you?" she groused. "I was trying to do something nice!"

"I-"

"If you don't like it, I can take it back."

Soul immediately clutched the guitar a little tighter. "No!" he said quickly. "No, it's great. I just thought it was kinda weird to be giving  _me_  a present on  _your_  birthday is all, jeez."

"Alright then," she said, her exasperated expression settling back into a more neutral smile. "I thought you might enjoy learning a new instrument, and the guitar's supposed to be cool, so..."

Soul was pretty sure she was blushing a little. If she hadn't just done a surprisingly nice thing for him seemingly out of the blue, he probably would have laughed at her. As it was, he just looked down at the instrument in his hands and remarked, "Guitar  _is_  pretty cool."

He studied the two-toned body of the instrument with an appraising eye. It appeared to be secondhand, but it was in good condition, and he couldn't help the grin that spread across his face. He'd always wanted to learn to play guitar, but his old man had flat-out forbidden it. Apparently he wasn't allowed to waste time on "frivolities" when he had serious studies to he was supposed to be applying himself to.  _Just watch me be frivolous_ now _, Pops_...

He stripped the ribbon off the neck of the guitar and plucked experimentally at the strings, able to tell within moments that it wasn't in tune. He would have to buy a book and learn to tune the thing before he did anything else, and he was going to have to learn to read guitar tabs because he'd seen them before and it didn't look a thing like regular sheet music, and...

A thought occurred to him.

"Hey," he said, looking up at Maka, "this doesn't mean I have to buy you a present when it's my birthday again, does it?"

Maybe he should have anticipated  _Emma_  being hurled at his head, but somehow he was caught off-guard anyway.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is actually a very personal chapter for me. I was heavily involved in music from an extremely early age (I believe I was 15 or 16 months old when I informed my parents that I wanted to learn to play the harp, which I still haven't gotten around to doing), learned to read sheet music before I learned to read English (and I learned to read before starting kindergarten so that will tell you something), was involved in concert band, pep band, marching band, jazz band, all of my school's choirs, and performed in every musical my high school put on. And then... I graduated. I went to college to go be a journalist or a geologist or a whatever-the-fuck-Spanish-majors-do, and after a lifetime steeped in music up to my eyeballs I suddenly had one hour-long choir rehearsal a week and that was it.
> 
> There were a lot of other factors that contributed to my struggle with bipolar disorder (and in particular the depressive side of the spectrum), but one of the biggest ones was that music was cut out of my life almost entirely. I was a hundred miles away from the piano that had been a constant companion of mine since I was three, I didn't touch my oboe for months at a time, I barely sang except recreationally... it messed me up. It messed me up a lot. And for Soul, who is as predisposed towards mental illness as I am if not more so (probably more so)... I can't see him coming to Shibusen and cutting music out of his life without suffering some serious mental/emotional side effects.
> 
> This chapter is by no means comprehensive (especially being told from Maka's point of view) and much is left to implication in the space between the lines (at least in my opinion), but it is heavily based on my own experiences. And after all, that guitar in Soul's room had to come from _somewhere._


	11. Cohabitation Snippets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So, this is a little different. I think it's self-explanatory, though. I might do more chapters like this in the future, I haven't made up my mind yet.

**Color**

"Even if we  _were_  going to paint the living room- which we're not, by the way, because there's no way we'd get the security deposit back- there is no way we are going to paint it that horrible shade of yellow!"

"Aw, c'mon. The yellow's cool."

"Actually, technically speaking, yellow lies on the warm end of the color spectrum, so by definition, it can't-"

"Dear Death, woman, how can you be such a smartass and a nerd at the same time?"

"..."

"Do not hit me with that! Do not-! _SHIT, ow!_  Oh my god I think you broke my shoulder, Maka! What the hell?"

"I did  _not_  break your shoulder."

"...feels like it."

"Well then don't be a jerk!"

"Fine, but if this swells up you owe me."

"...we're painting the living room yellow, aren't we?"

"Yep."

"You're the only person I know who can make me feel really bad for hitting you and annoyed enough with you to want to hit you again at the exact same time."

"It's a gift."

**Mouth**

Maka discovered quite soon after they began sharing an apartment that her partner was a stickler for oral hygiene. She probably shouldn't have been surprised. He bought toothbrushes in bulk and he used the fancy whitening toothpaste. He had three different kinds of mouthwash stashed in the cabinet under the sink.

What he did not have, surprisingly, was floss.

When she asked him about it, he laughed out loud. "Floss? Are you kidding me?" Hooking a finger into the corner of his mouth, he pulled his lip back to reveal his intimidating teeth. Voice muffled slightly by the finger in his mouth, he added, "Floss just snaps. I can't even use it."

"Oh," she said, feeling a little silly for not working that out. "I didn't think of that."

"It's not a problem most people deal with," he said with a careless shrug. "I'm kinda surprised you haven't asked about 'em yet."

"Your teeth?"

"Yeah."

She had wanted to ask rather badly, actually. "I figured it wasn't really any of my business."

"Eh, I don't mind if you ask. I like 'em."

"Really?"

He nodded. "When I was a kid my parents wanted to have them filed down, but I threw a fit. Kept threatening to bite the dentist."

"So they are natural, then?" she asked curiously.

"Yep. Between my looks and my scythe gene, I'm just one big clusterfuck of recessive traits."

His phrasing brought a frown to her face, but Maka chose not to comment. Instead she simply said, "They're definitely not like anything I've ever seen… and living in Death City you see some weird things."

Soul chuckled. "I bet. To tell you the truth, they used to be a lot smaller. Still sharp as hell, but…" He shrugged. "These suckers grew in after my baby teeth fell out. Not a fun adjustment, lemme tell ya."

Maka's brow furrowed in confusion. "Why?"

"Why do you think? I'd only just gotten to the point where I wasn't constantly biting myself by mistake as it was, and then-" He gave a broad, snarling grin, all the better to display his carnivorous-looking pearly whites.

She tilted her head to the side, studying his mouth intently. Suddenly, a devious grin of her own snuck across her lips. "Wait… is that why you drool all the time?"

Soul's smug look dropped from his face and he turned a rather charming shade of pink. "Shut up," he mumbled. "I can't help it, my jaw's still a little too small to fit them, okay? It was either dealing with some drool sometimes or oral surgery and boring  _normal_  teeth."

Maka's only reply was cackling laughter.

**Nature**

Maka liked to keep plants. Soul wasn't surprised. As much as he enjoyed not having to put up with rain and fog and snow and all kinds of other ever-so-pleasant weather phenomena common on the East Coast, he could admit to missing growing things. He could completely understand why a girl like Maka, who had grown up in Death Valley, would want to have something alive and growing nearby. Death City had more deciduous trees than this part of Nevada had any right to expect (he'd heard a rumor that Lord Death himself had planted them centuries ago), but that couldn't totally compensate.

So she had her collection of ivy vines and aloe plants and African violets and little cacti with golden spines and big red blobs on top, and her one prized bonsai azalea that she kept on the side table and fussed over like it was an infant or something.

"What's up with that thing, anyway?" he asked her once, after witnessing her having a minor meltdown over having forgotten to water it on schedule. "You're nicer to it than you are to me half the time."

She shot him a look, her nose crinkling up in that funny combination of annoyance and amusement (but mostly annoyance) he now considered to be his sacred duty to invoke as often as possible. "If you must know, my mama started this bonsai when she was just about my age. It was a birthday present from  _her_  mama. She started teaching me how to care for it when I was a toddler, and she officially gave it to me on my tenth birthday."

Ah. So it was from her mother. No surprise that it was that important to her, then. Seeing that she was still giving him that slightly sour expression, he said, "That's actually cool. It's nice that you and your mom did that together." He wondered, if things had been different, he would have had some cool bonding thing like that with his dad. Sometimes he was pretty sure that it was his own fault that he didn't.

Oblivious to his musings, Maka smiled and said, "Would you like me to teach you?"

He was actually kind of tempted, but...

"Nah, I'm not that interested in your geeky tree stuff."

She huffed at him angrily, and that was the last she said on the subject.

So Soul watched her tending to the thing out of the corner of his eye, observing closely as she measured out fertilizer and trimmed the branches with the tiniest imaginable pair of shears and dead-headed the blossoms when they withered. And if, every so often, she was too tired from all the extra training she put herself through, and ended up just coming straight home and passing out without remembering to water the thing... well, maybe he knew how damp the soil needed to be kept.

**Memory**

Tsubaki snaps the first picture ever taken of the two of them together. The four of them were hanging out at Deathbucks and Tsubaki, wanting to document the moment, took a few pictures.

The one of Soul and Maka wasn't exactly inspired photography. They were in focus (more or less) but the background was a little fuzzy, and it was candid. Not intentionally, it was supposed to be a posed shot, but then Maka noticed that Soul was scowling out of the corner of her eye, so she elbowed him to get him to smile, and he pulled her pigtail in retaliation, and... well...

At first Maka didn't want the copy of it Tsubaki gave her, but after a few days seeing it lying on her desk top, she actually became kind of fond of it. It was definitely representative of their partnership, she decided.

She had a copy made and hung on the refrigerator, but the original she put in a little frame and it remained in place on her desk.

Soul, she discovered a few months later, also had a copy.

**Money**

The stipends allotted to Shibusen students were prorated based on a variety of factors. Students who were still being financially supported by their families received less than others, and students living in off-campus apartments were afforded a larger share than the students who lived in the dormitories. Once meisters in the EAT class had achieved a star rating, their biweekly increased further, with two star meisters receiving more than one stars, and three stars receiving more than two stars, etc. There were a variety of other factors that influenced the pay grade for student stipends (enough so that there were three whole employees in the financial office whose entire job was dedicated to calculating and issuing the cheques) but those were the most important.

When a meister and weapon were partnered, there were several ways they could choose to handle the money. Most chose to keep their finances separate, especially amongst the NOT students, whose partnerships were significantly more likely to dissolve upon graduation. But others... well...

"I think we should open a joint checking account," Maka announced.

"Huh?"

She shrugged, flipping another page in the book she was reading and not even looking up, as if it weren't a strange thing for her to have blurted out without warning. "I was just thinking, since we live together and we already split the cost of most of our other expenses, why not just have a joint account so that we can stop doing all this math to try and figure out who owes who what for groceries and stuff?"

Soul pondered that for a moment. "Sounds like a good idea."

"Yeah. We could each keep 10% of our stipend for personal spending money and just put the rest in the account and call it good."

"Make it 40%."

"Fifteen."

"Thirty-five."

"Twenty."

Soul hesitated. Negotiation-ready Maka was a rare creature as it was. Better not to push his luck. "Fine, twenty, whatever. Just let me pick the bank and stuff, okay?"

"No way!"

"No, seriously, Maka. I'm not kidding. I know a lot about handling financial stuff, okay? I can make sure we get a really great interest rate and stuff."

She stared at him, green eyes narrowed slightly in confusion. "You're serious?"

"As the plague."

Another moment's hesitation, during which she contemplated him with a thoughtful look on her face, then she shrugged. "Whatever floats your boat. Just don't mess it all up."

"Come on, what do you take me for?"

"A guy who slept his way right through our entire math class last week."

She only giggled with one of the couch pillows collided with her head.


	12. Qualifying Exam

The vast majority of Shibusen students were not combat trained. The NOT class, which made up 90% of the student body, would never see battle. The weapons among them were taught to control their form of course, and all students were taught standard self-defense and first aid. No graduate of Shibusen was ever defenseless. But for the most part, the NOT students were trained for a different sort of life. Many returned to their home countries to pursue positions in the government or military. A large number were retained in Lord Death's employ, because no matter what, every graduate of the academy would always have a place at Shibusen, if they wanted one. This was especially important for weapons in the NOT class, because while NOT meisters might do well in politics or law or any number of other fields, weapons had fear and prejudice to contend with in the outside world. Death City was a haven for weapons with nowhere else to go, and Lord Death did not abandon his students.

Therefore, many NOT graduates, especially weapons, acted as support staff for field operatives or to maintained the day to day function of the academy itself. They were important roles within the structure of Lord Death's organization, ones Shibusen could not hope to function without, and they lacked the inherent danger of taking combat missions. That was why many students, even those who might have qualified for higher placement, chose to remain in the NOT class.

Maka Albarn had no interest in the NOT class.

Soul knew his meister was ambitious, and they had both been tracked as potential candidates for the EAT class from the start based on their initial evaluations. Somehow he had still thought that she'd wait at least a year or two before actually attempting to move up the ranks to the advanced classes. Clearly, he had underestimated her, which was why he found himself spending an entire Saturday (a  _Saturday!_ ) sweating through the written portion of the qualifying exam.

The entrance exam for the EAT class consisted of both a written and practical test. The exam was offered twice a year, at the start of June and at the end of December. Given the choice, Soul would have preferred to wait until December, if only because it was damn hot in Death Valley in the summer and he had nearly passed out during the practical exam. He didn't know how the hell Maka had made it through, considering she was the one actually running around in that heat...

 _"Left- I said_ left _you moron!"  
_

_Maka growled low in her throat, dodging beneath a fierce swing she only just barely saw coming. "Shut up, Soul!"_

_"I'll shut up when you start looking where you're going!" His voice actually tasted metallic on his tongue as he shouted at her from the blade._

_She saw the next obstacle coming a few seconds too late and was struck in the chest. She stumbled backward, struggling to catch her breath enough to spit at him, "You're distracting me, idiot!"_

_The training grounds where the practical exam was administered were something of a technological marvel. A meister whose name Soul could be bothered to remember had invented the system fifty or sixty years back. A series of rubber mannequins designed to look like pre-kishin ran along a complex set of intertwining tracks. They were fast-moving and some of them had protruding fists or sticky tentacle things designed to trip up the meister running the course. It had been designed in such a way that the moving targets were randomized, never running in the same pattern twice in one day.  
_

_The object was to cross the field as quickly as possible, eliminating as many of the targets as possible, while simultaneously trying to limit the number of direct hits to the meister's body. Soul thought it was a little bit like a real-life video game. Like Frogger, but in hell._

_"Well, you're doing a shit job, maybe you_ should _be distracted and just let me handle- duck!"_

_Maka ducked, sliding into a fluid roll to pass under the low hit aimed at them, and if the move had worked as planned, she would have immediately whirled and driven Soul's blade directly into the target in retaliation. However, although it was a very simple move she had learned from her gymnastics lessons, she had never attempted it while holding Soul before, and she underestimated how much she would have to accommodate his blade. When she was back on her feet and reading for the swing, Soul's haft was yanked from her hands._

_She stared down at her sweating palms in confusion. "What-?"_

_"I'm stuck in the ground, you idiot!"_

_Maka tugged his blade free from the soil with some effort, her little body straining. No matter how recently begun, their soul bond was true and Soul was light in her hands, but his blade was wedged deep and she didn't have quite the right angle to free him easily.  
_

Once they were free to move once again, Maka turned back to the matter at hand, hacking and slashing with much more enthusiasm than style.

They had passed that part... or at least, he was pretty sure they had. Results wouldn't be up until Monday. It hadn't been an especially impressive showing, for they didn't have much experience with Maka actually wielding him, but it was effective enough and their evaluating instructor had said so.

But if nearly getting their asses sliced, diced, and roasted by rubber dummies had been an unpleasant experience, it was nothing compared to the hell that had been living with Maka for the last month and a half. He had always known that his meister was a bookworm, but watching her get in the zone for their regular tests was nothing compared to Maka preparing for the most important test of their lives.

_Soul watched Maka flipping frenetically through her notebook, a pencil in her mouth and with only one pigtail done up. He wasn't sure what exactly she was searching for or why she wasn't just reading calmly through the notes like she had been for the last half hour before she suddenly started freaking out and scrambling through her notes like they were going to disappear or something. In his opinion, all that studying really wasn't worth the effort it took.  
_

_"I can't believe you're just sitting there at a time like this!" Maka said abruptly. "The exam is in three days, you need to study!"_

_"Tch. Studying isn't cool."_

_She looked ready to stab him with that pencil. "You know what else isn't cool?" she demanded, voice rising to really unreasonable levels. "Getting stuck in the stupid NOT class for the rest of our time at Shibusen because you couldn't be bothered to study and dragged me down with you!"_

_Soul rolled his eyes, settling his head a little more comfortably against the armrest of the couch. "Relax, Maka. If I flunk we can just take it again in December."_

_"No we can't!"_

_"Sure we c-"_

_"No!" Maka burst out, interrupting him angrily. "That's what I've been trying to tell you, Soul! We only get one shot at this. You get into the EAT class on your first try or you don't get in at all."_

_He stared at her. "Wait... we only get to do this once?"_

_"They only make exceptions in extreme circumstances."_

_"Once and that's it?"_

_"Yep."_

_"Oh crap."_

_Suddenly he was a lot less complacent, because he might not be as vocal or as energetic about it as Maka, but he really wanted to graduate from the EAT class. He supposed there was nothing wrong with what the NOT students learned, but... he was a weapon. He was literally born for battle. What was the point of being a weapon if you didn't act like it?_

_"Why the hell would you sign us up for a test like that this soon?" he demanded._

_"Because I'm your meister and I said so!"_

_"That's not a reason!"_

_Maka sighed. "Look, I just... I just want to be as good as my mama was. And I want to make you a better death scythe than my Papa could ever be. It's all I've ever wanted, you know that."_

_There she went again, hinging all her dreams and ambitions on him, and Soul had no idea how to explain to her that she was making a horrible mistake. And yet, when he remembered how she had looked when she stood dripping in the hallway months and months ago on the night her mother left, he knew this wasn't something he could just give up on. He had to try, at least.  
_

_Still..._

_"There's no way I'm gonna pass the written portion!"_

_Maka looked sheepish. "I'll help you study," she said._

_Soul groaned and threw his arm over his eyes. "There's no way it's gonna do any good," he said. "Just reading notes doesn't help at all."_

_He hadn't heard her cross the room, but suddenly she was pushing his legs out of the way and sitting down where they had been. "We'll get it, Soul," she said. "I promise. I haven't worked this hard for this long for us to fail just because of a little setback like this."_

_He moved his arm to peer at her with the most sardonic expression on his face that he could muster. "Maka?"  
_

_"Hm?"_

_"You're eleven."_

_"And I've been preparing for this since I was four," she replied over-sweetly. "Now sit up, we're gonna study."_

_Soul hauled himself upright with a groan. "I'm telling you, it's not gonna be much use."_

_Maka nibbled on her lower lip thoughtfully. "My mama always says there was more than one way to study," she mused. "You're so musical... maybe you're more of an auditory learner?"  
_

_"A what?"_

_"An auditory learner. It means you remember things better by hearing them than by reading."_

_Yeah, actually, that did sound like him. Maka was weird like that. Sometimes she was the most oblivious girl in the world, nose in a book and missing what he felt were obvious signs, but when she picked up on something,_ man _was she accurate!_

_"Okay, here's what we're going to do," Maka said. "I'm going to read my notes aloud and then you explain it back to me."_

_"Bossy," he muttered._

_"Yeah, well, deal with it."_

After the fact, Soul was glad for Maka's pushiness in forcing him to study. The exam wasn't as hard as they had been fearing, and Soul got the idea that it was a lot more about evaluating their suitability for EAT work than it was about actually testing their knowledge. Still, he was grateful that she'd gone out of her way to force as much knowledge into his brain as she could, because it proved useful.

He didn't plan to make a habit out of this "studying" crap, because it really was seriously uncool. But the way Maka jumped up and down in elation and gave him one of those over-enthusiastic hugs she was prone to when she was excited when the results were posted and Albarn/Eater was listed right at the very top... that was pretty cool.


	13. The Rival

The thing about moving up to the EAT class was that they got a whole new set of classmates. This wasn't necessarily a bad thing, because although Maka had a low tolerance for lengthy periods of social interaction, she was generally outgoing and made friends easily. Even Soul seemed to be making friends. He didn't reach out to anybody, but she'd discovered that if she introduced him to someone he would be friendly. Well, friendly for Soul. Which wasn't really all that friendly, but once their classmates got used to his sense of humor, he seemed to get on with them well enough, which was all that was really necessary.

She was also pleased to discover that seeing less of Black*Star (although he and Tsubaki were EAT-tracked as well, they hadn't yet taken the qualifying exam to move up to the advanced clas) did wonders for her overall disposition. She wasn't sure you could have high blood pressure before you were twelve, but if you could, Black*Star had absolutely been the cause of hers. They still saw the ninja and his graceful weapon frequently, but she didn't have to put up with him disrupting class, which could only be a good thing because the types of classes they had been enrolled in as EAT students were  _hard_.

It didn't help that an obnoxious little toerag called Ox Ford, of all the absurd things, kept turning their schoolwork into a contest.

He was about two years older than her, with an obnoxious pudding bowl haircut and a smirk that had all of Soul's arrogance and none of his charm. He was a meister, and as far as she knew, he was the first one in his family. She could tell he was no Death Child, and he'd never mentioned any other members of his family who had attended Shibusen… and he would most _definitely_  have mentioned it if he had any. He was one of those boys who had been told he was brilliant all his life and was never given any reason to think otherwise. Proving how much more clever he was than everyone else in the room seemed to be his favorite pastime.

It was an attitude Maka had always hated,  _especially_  in boys, but she would have been perfectly content to ignore him (no, really, she would have!) if he hadn't dragged her into it. He noticed straight away that she was bright, and seemed to view her as competition. Any time he got a higher grade, whether it be on a test or on a simple homework assignment, he shot her that superior smirk of his. He made snide little digs about his higher standing in the class at every opportunity, and it took everything in her not to stand up on a desk and shout to the heavens that  _of course_  he had a higher standing, he was two years older and she'd only been in EAT for a couple of months!

However, she didn't want to cause a disruption in class, so she held her tongue and seethed and tried not to rise to his bait, and if this resulted in a larger than usual number of snapped pencils and crumpled up pages stained purple where her pens had exploded… well, that was the price she paid for obeying the rules.

But really, the kid was just  _begging_  for a good pounding, and Maka desperately wanted to be the one to administer it.

It was halfway through October, and the entirety of Death City was gearing up for Halloween with almost comical exuberance, when her opportunity finally presented itself.

Maka was walking the nearly-empty hallways of Shibusen, her face folded into an unpleasant scowl. She and Soul had had another fight that morning. It hadn't been their usual snarky bickering, either, but an actual fight. It had started with some complaint about Maka continually forgetting to knock before walking into his room, but it had escalated into a shouted litany of household gripes. Ultimately it was trivial, but they'd both been rude, and now neither one was willing to back down and be the first one to apologize. It had soured the whole day, and she'd hung back to talk to Professor Bradbury after class just so she wouldn't have to walk home with Soul in awkward silence.

Voices from around the nearest corner reached her ears, and when she recognized her partner's lazy drawl, she froze.

"—don't see how that's any of your business."

"No, seriously, I really want to know," another familiar voice replied. It was Ox, she realized. "Did you always look like that, or did you change when your weapon form manifested? I'm fascinated by the phenotypes associated with the weapon gene. I've heard you've got bizarro coloration on your blade in your weapon form, too, and from the reading I've done I know that's pretty unusual. So is your albinism an inherited trait or a manifestation associated wi—?"

Soul let out a growl of frustration. "I  _said_ , my looks are none of your damn business!"

"Aw, c'mon Eater, I'm only curious."

"Yeah, well, you can take your curiosity and stuff it where the sun don't shine."

"You can't keep stonewalling me forever! I just want to learn more about you," Ox protested.

Soul huffed. "Then why don't you go read a damn book? The library's full of books about weapons if you're so fucking curious."

"I know, but I would rather get a more personal perspective."

"Just FYI, Ford?  _This_  is why you don't have a partner yet," Soul snapped, and Maka could hear her scythe's familiar, flat-footed stomp as he strode angrily down the hallway in the opposite direction.

Maka leaned up against the wall for a moment, sick to her stomach. She had heard stories about the prejudice and hatred weapons faced in many places outside of Death City, but this was something else again. Ox didn't hate or fear weapons, she knew that. Whatever else could be said about him, he wasn't a vicious person. But even so here he was, pestering Soul—  _Soul_ , who might just be the most intensely private person she'd ever known!— with extremely personal and invasive questions. And from the sounds of things, this wasn't the first time he'd bothered him.

The demands, the pushiness, the sheer  _ignorance_  suddenly had Maka's blood boiling on a whole different level.

She stalked around the corner, fists clenched. "Hey, Ox!" she growled.

Ox turned around. "Ah, Albarn. Have you come to—"

But whatever he had been about to say was cut off when the petite blonde reached up and grabbed onto his uniform tie, yanking him forcibly down to her level. He let out a highly unmasculine squeak as his tie was cinched tight about his throat.

"Listen, bub, I dunno how things work wherever the hell  _you_  come from, but around here? We respect other peoples' privacy," she said, very close to his face with her eyes flashing dangerously. "And no matter what the rest of the world apparently thinks, weapons  _are_  people."

"I know that!" Ox choked out. "I just want to learn—"

"So go read a book, like Soul said! Or, if you're really  _that_  lazy, ask one of the professors! Don't follow weapons around asking them uncomfortable questions!"

Ox wasn't paying much attention, as he struggled fruitlessly to get free. He might be older and taller, but she was a great deal stronger, having trained as a meister for years before he'd even learned he had the potential to be one.

"Geezus, Albarn, will you get off me?" he growled. "You're choking me!"

"No way," she said, giving him a smirk she thought even Soul would have been impressed by. She did, however, stop tugging him down quite so hard, because he was turning an alarming shade of red. "Not yet, anyway."

"What do you want? You've said your piece, I get it, I'll leave your stupid weapon alone-!"

"Oh no, I'm not letting you off that easily! You and I are going to go back to Professor Bradbury's office and ask him to supervise a duel."

Ox snorted. "A duel? With a little girl like you? I think not."

Maka restrained the urge to beat the crap out of him right then and there, breathing out hard through her nostrils to keep from strangling him. "Why? Are you scared?" she mocked.

"Not likely."

She grinned.

* * *

Soul was making fried rice when she got home, a dishtowel thrown over his shoulder as he tossed a handful of carrots into the pan.

"What took you so long?" he asked, glancing over his shoulder.

"Just got caught up in… um… some stuff," she said vaguely.

His cocked his head to one side. "Okay. Hey, what's on your face?"

Maka raised her hand to the slightly swollen cut on her right cheek. She had hoped he wouldn't notice until she could ice it down a little. "Oh, uh, this?"

"Yeah. Looks like somebody sucker-punched you or something."

"No no!" she blurted out quickly. "Just… tripped on the stairs?"

One white eyebrow rose skeptically. "You? Tripped?"

With a nervous giggle, she said, "Yep. Guess I was having an off day, huh?"

He stared at her blankly for another few moments, then shrugged and turned back to the stove. "Okay. Whatever. Supper's ready in five."

If Soul noticed the next day that Ox came to class with a split lip, a black eye, a splinted wrist, and a head shaved bald to hide the places where Maka had ripped out several chunks of his hair…

Well, he was good enough not to say anything.


	14. On The Subject of Budgets

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Remember how I said at the beginning that these might not always be chronological? Well, this is one of those times. This story jumps allllll the way back to the very first week of their partnership, because I was in desperate need of fish-out-of-water Soul. Because you know he totally was when he first got to Death City. So this is me, fucking with sheltered little rich kid Soul.

Although Soul hated to admit it, growing up as an Evans had not prepared him very well for living anything other than the country club lifestyle. He was happy to be out from under the crushing weight of his brother's shadow, and fucking ecstatic to replace his parents' chilly house with the warm Nevada sunshine, but the real world was a bit of a slap to the face.

Moving to DC was culture shock enough, but there was another major difference that freaked him out more than the extreme gothic tombstone shit and morbid Death Child humor.

Namely, the change in tax bracket.

It started with the student stipend. Since he lived in an apartment instead of the dorms, his stipend was higher than most other NOT students, to account for his rent and food expenses. Nevertheless, when he got his first week's check in its little yellow envelope, the number astonished him. It wasn't even enough for pocket money!

Money was something Soul had never given a whole lot of thought. He knew his parents had a lot of it. He knew what a trust fund was, and he knew about interest rates and how to balance a checkbook, because his mother had sat him down and taught him this stuff when he was eight or nine. But knowing how money worked and actually having to  _worry_  about money were very different things.

It never occurred to him just how much his lifestyle was going to have to change without his parents to pay for things. He had a vague idea of how a budget was supposed to work, but until now, he'd never envisioned needing one. He definitely wasn't interested in getting a side job to make more money, because on top of classes, that seemed like  _way_  too much work… but how the hell was somebody expected to live on only $800 a month? Especially since over half of that was going to be eaten up by rent money?!

At first, he was mighty proud of himself for how he handled it. He calculated how much he would need to set aside each week– and he even remembered the electric bill!– and squirreled that amount away from his first check in a little tin can, which he decorated with some pretty badass skull-and-crossbones stickers he bought at the crafting store and tucked it safely into his closet. He felt exceptionally fiscally responsible.

He was so pleased with himself, in fact, that he treated himself to a large stuffed crust pizza with extra green peppers from Gravestone's. And did so again the next night. And the next night. And it  _totally_  had nothing to do with the fact that he had no other food in the house. No, it was  _absolutely_  because he was a newly independent man celebrating his freedom like the cool guy he was. He was especially pleased by the fact that he could also get them to deliver two-liter sodas. He had never been allowed to drink anything closer to cola than rootbeer, so the discovery of Mtn. Death– which as far as he could tell was the D.C. knockoff of Mtn. Dew– was a revelation.

But pizza delivery was not cheap, and by the time Thursday rolled around, he was down to three bucks and two slices of pizza to live on until Sunday. Standing in the Shibusen cafeteria and realizing that he could afford either an apple or a pudding cup for his lunch was incredibly depressing.

Deciding that, as cool as pudding cups were, the apple was probably smarter, he picked out the largest fruit from the pile, paid for it, and shuffled back over to the table where Maka was already sitting with Black*Star and Tsubaki. He slunk into his chair, hoping that just this once the dynamic duo that was Maka and Black*Star would leave him the hell alone so he could eat his pathetic lunch in peace.

He was half-lucky. Black*Star was deeply involved in regaling Tsubaki with some story Soul could not give less of a shit about and didn't acknowledge (or more likely didn't notice) his arrival at the table. Maka, on the other hand, seemed to have developed some freaky talent for immediately being aware of him at all times, and she glanced over at him with a little smile that quickly turned into a puzzled frown when she spotted his solitary apple.

"You're not eating?" she asked.

Since there was absolutely no chance in hell he was going to admit to being flat broke, he shrugged. "Not hungry."

Her look was quizzical as she said, "Yesterday you ate a hamburger, three orders of the cheesy bread, a bowl of broccoli, and still ended up stealing three of Black*Star's onigiri."

"So?"

"So something's wrong."

He gave her his best impassive stare and said, casual as cake, "Nothin's wrong."

Her frown deepened, and her nose wrinkled up as she studied him in a way that made him feel like he was under a microscope. "Are you sick?" she asked.

"What? No!"

"Well if you're not sick, why aren't you eating?"

He grumbled in annoyance, "Would you just drop it?"

"No! I'm your meister and it's my job to make sure you're in good condition!"

"'Good condition?' I'm a weapon, not a car!"

"It's still my job to make sure you're healthy!"

He rolled his eyes. "Whatever, I had a big breakfast, can't a guy just eat his fruit in peace?"

She huffed frustratedly, pouting in a way he did not think was cute because cute was reserved for baby animals and definitely not pushy, baby-faced meisters. "Fine, have it your way," she groused, turning back to listen to Black*Star.

She ignored him for most of the rest of the day, sitting silently next to him unless she was answering questions in class (which she always did, he was discovering, _jeez_  she was nerdy!) and stalking along with fast steps to stay ahead of him in the hallway.

Somehow, the fact that he'd gotten his way didn't feel very good. But that might've just been because his stomach was empty and not at all happy about it.

* * *

Unable to bring himself to eat any of his precious pizza reserve, his dinner had been an entire bag of Doritos he'd bought with the very last of his stipend, but it had done exactly nothing to satisfy his stomach's demands. By the time lunch period rolled around on Friday, he was pretty sure his blood sugar was low enough to dig to China, but he only had six cents in his pocket and that wasn't gonna buy him jack.

He felt awful. Soul couldn't recall a time he'd ever really been  _hungry_  before. Sure, he had a pretty healthy appetite and looked forward to mealtimes as much as anybody else, but he was discovering that there was a big difference between having the tummy rumbles and being genuinely underfed for over twenty-four hours. He felt shaky and a little bit sick to his stomach, which was confusing, because all he wanted to do was eat  _everything_ , but he was pretty sure if he ate he would puke.

And unfortunately, Maka very much noticed. She had gotten over being annoyed with him by the time they met up on the front steps that morning, but when she noticed him sitting empty-handed at their table, she immediately looked irritated again… but also worried, which was weirdly gratifying.

"You're not eating again?" she asked.

He shrugged.

She leaned closer to him, studying him closely. "You don't look so good, Soul."

He shrugged again.

"Seriously, what's wrong?"

He didn't really feel up to lying to her today.

"Don't have any money," he mumbled, avoiding her eyes by staring at the table instead.

"What? But you get two hundred dollars a week!" she exclaimed.

He nodded miserably. "Gotta set some aside for rent and stuff."

"But you should still have plenty left for groceries!" she protested.

_Groceries?_

"I… uh… didn't get groceries," he said, as quietly as he could, hoping that somehow she would misunderstand him or not hear him at all and let this conversation just be over.

The idea of buying  _groceries_  hadn't even occurred to him, and in hindsight, that was so embarrassing he wanted to crawl under the table and die. This was the least cool thing that had ever, ever happened to him and he was never going to live this down and he would be the laughingstock of Death City when people found out because people  _always_  found out about stuff like this somehow and Maka would probably end their partnership right now because who the hell would want a partner who was too stupid to even think to buy groceries?

But Maka wasn't staring at him in contempt. She mostly looked confused. "But… what did you spend your money on, then?"

He suddenly longed for the power to turn invisible. "Uh… pizza?"

She blinked. "All of it?"

"Yes?"

"But… why would you do that?"

The fact that she sounded totally astonished by his newfound poverty just made him feel worse. He was not cut out for this low-income thing, because if Maka's reaction was anything to judge by, he really really sucked at it.

"Dunno," he mumbled, wondering if every eye in the cafeteria was really on him or if he was just paranoid.

He couldn't have looked up at her if his life depended on it, but when Maka spoke, she sounded  _worried_  of all things. "Do you have any food at all?" she asked.

"Couple slices of pizza."

"Oh." She was quiet for a minute, then said, "Do you want to come to dinner tonight?"

That was enough to get him to look up at her. "Like… at your house?"

She nodded, a tentative smile on her face. "I'd like to introduce you to my family," she said. "Since you're my partner and all."

Technically he'd already met her dad– twice now, actually– but that was beside the point.

He chewed carefully on his upper lip as he pondered her offer. Dinner at Maka's house. Dinner at Maka's house… with her… and her parents… with Death Scythe and the meister who had forged him… That was a lot of pressure. He wasn't sure he was prepared to handle that.

"Papa and I are making stew," she said, waving it temptingly in front of him like the proverbial carrot, which he supposed made him the ass in this scenario.

He sighed heavily. "Okay," he said, trying to sound resigned. "But only because I'm pretty sure I'm gonna pass out if I don't eat something."

* * *

Soul eyed the grocery store in front of them dubiously.

Dinner the night before had gone as well as could be expected with Death Scythe glowering at him from across the table, but at least Maka's mom had been nice enough, if a little bit frosty, and she had kept Maka's dad from being too much of an asshole. He was mostly just glad to eat something, and the stew had actually been pretty good.

After dinner, however, Maka had insisted that she was not going to let her partner starve over the weekend, even if he  _had_  brought it on himself, and if that meant spending the remainder of her stipend on groceries for him, then so be it. She'd also added that he'd better not expect her to do this again, because she felt bad for him but she was also trying to save up while she still lived with her parents, and she couldn't keep blowing all her money to feed him. It was the weirdest combination of generosity and stinginess, and he was once again baffled by this tiny girl he called meister, who he had only known for a little over a week. Already she was leading him around by the nose, it seemed, and he was both irritated and oddly comforted by it.

Her insistence was what led to him standing on the scorching blacktop in front of an Albertson's– he had at least managed to talk her into going to a  _real_  grocery store and not DeathMart, thank  _god_ – on a Saturday morning, skeptical as hell and more than a little apprehensive.

"What's that look for?" Maka asked, stepping onto the sidewalk beside him.

"What look?"

Her eyebrows were drawn together, but she was smiling bemusedly at him. "You look like the doors are gonna eat you. Why don't you just go inside, silly?"

Admitting he had never actually been to a grocery store before was not on today's agenda, so he said, "Just waiting on your sloth ass, duh."

She huffed and punched him in the shoulder hard enough that he was absolutely going to have a bruise tomorrow. "Don't be a jerk, Soul. Let's go." She walked forward through the automatic doors and into the mercifully air conditioned store, Soul trailing along behind her.

The sight that greeted him was enough to make him stop dead in his tracks again. There was food  _everywhere_ , a whole field of fruits and vegetables spread out before him, so much of it he thought he could die a happy man right here and now. And he could see a glowing neon tube on the back wall spelling out  _Meats_ , and over to his left there was an entire section dedicated to what he was pretty sure were piles and piles of artisan cheeses, and the grocery store was officially now his favorite place.

He didn't realize how much he'd been rubbernecking until Maka asked, "What are you staring at? You act like you've never seen a grocery store before!"

Soul made the very eloquent reply of "um…"

Maka's eyes widened. "Wait,  _have_  you never been in a grocery store?"

Crap. He was not admitting that his parents ordered their shopping and had it delivered to the kitchen for the chef to prepare, especially not in front of Maka, who had clearly done this before. "Uh… my parents never took me with them," he said, which wasn't technically a lie. Maka didn't need to know that his parents hadn't gone in the first place.

She was giving him that bemused look again. "Jeez, how sheltered  _were_  you? Alright, c'mon Soul, I'll show you the ropes."

Grocery shopping was bizarre, but he was pretty sure it was also going to be his new hobby. They bought the staples, stuff like butter, milk, eggs, and a couple of seasonings (he still wasn't sure why Maka insisted on getting  _garlic salt_  in a  _can_  when he could have just bought whole garlic instead). They got all his favorites, oranges and asparagus and blueberry yogurt and two loaves of bread, one French and one sourdough, and a roasted chicken that he could just heat up in the oven. Maka also made him put some other things in his shopping cart, stuff like grapefruit and sunflower seeds and spinach, that were supposedly good for maintaining weapon health.

There were also things that Soul had never even heard of before. Pre-cooked pasta in cans that you could just heat up in the microwave. Cheese in a bag that had already been grated for you. Fruits and veggies that came in  _cans_  (he insisted on buying two cans of pineapple, which Maka raised an eyebrow at but didn't stop him from putting them in the cart). Whole entire _meals_  frozen in little plastic wrappers that you could heat up just like that, which Maka insisted were disgusting but he was pretty sure nothing that cool could be as gross as she made them sound so he picked out six of them (and she made him put back four).

His favorite thing, though, was the shopping cart itself. He'd seen them on TV, but he'd never realized how awesome they were. They had a little rack on the bottom– which he figured out from watching other customers had to be for big stuff like toilet paper and crates of soda (actual  _crates_  of soda! that was a thing!)– that, if used properly, was a perfect footrest. You could stand on the cart with one foot and push yourself along with the other and sail along at top speeds down the aisles.

After he nearly knocked over a little old lady, though, Maka made him stop. He could understand why, but he made a point to pout about it anyway.

When she led him over to the checkout lanes, there were three cashiers working, all of them looking entirely too likely to be judgmental for his taste. He could ignore random shoppers glancing twice at him because of his weird looks, but he was less thrilled by the prospect of being eyed curiously by somebody he would actually have to interact with. He found a glimmer of hope when he spotted the sign that said self-checkout above what appeared to be automated machines that would let you do it yourself, and he tried to steer the cart in that direction, but Maka grabbed his elbow. "Where are you going, doofus?" she asked, and dragged him back over to one of the unoccupied cashiers.

Apparently, he was getting stared at by strangers even more today after all.  _Fantastic._

While the middle-aged woman with her hair in a bun pulled tight enough to give her an amateur facelift scanned their purchases, Soul avoided eye contact by watching the little screen that showed the prices and total. That wasn't any better, though, because watching the numbers add up just made him feel nervous and guilty; Maka's stipend was less than his since she lived at home, and this was definitely getting uncomfortably close to her entire allotment for the week.

It seemed that even in Death City and away from his family, he was still just a useless burden to everybody around him.

Instead of staring at the screen, he decided to stare at his shoes instead.

"D'you got any coupons?" he heard the cashier ask, her voice bored and mechanical.

That made him look up, rather offended. "Aren't coupons for, like, poor people?" he asked, and regretted it deeply when Maka stomped on his foot and glared at him.

While Soul hopped on one foot and swore under his breath, Maka looked back at the cashier with a smile already back on her face. "Actually, yes," she chirped, taking out her wallet. She unfolded it and from the cash pocket withdrew a little stack of clippings that she handed over.

The cashier sighed, clearly annoyed at having to go to the trouble of putting in the discounts, but she dutifully punched each successive coupon into her register. "Sixty-three twenty-seven," she announced when she was finished, and Maka handed over the cash with a smile.

"What?" Soul asked, looking up sharply. "But that should've cost over a hundred bucks!"

Maka gave him a sickly-sweet grin. "That's why you use coupons, Soul," she said primly.

He stared in wonderment at the colorful slips of paper the cashier was tucking into the open drawer of her register, a new idea beginning to take shape in his head.

_One week later…_

Maka had just sat down at the top of the steps to wait for Soul, book on her lap, when he came streaking up to her, having apparently arrived before her for once.

"Maka!" he said excitedly. "Did you know there's coupons in the little inserts in the newspaper?!"

She rolled her eyes.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> For the record, all those stickers Soul put on his Definitely Not A Piggy Bank™ were absolutely glittery. He ignores this fact aggressively if it's brought up. And did anybody catch the fact that all the "good 4 weapons" type foods were all rich in iron? I think I'm so hilarious...


End file.
